What can offer an experience so tremendous as murder? What has science, philosophy, religion to give us comparable with the mysteries, dangers and triumphs of great crime? All are childish toys compared to it; and since, in any case, the next world will surely stultify our knowledge, confound our accepted truths, and reduce the wisdom of this earth to the prattle of childhood, I turned from physics and from metaphysics to action--and happening to taste blood early, tingled with the joy of it.
At fifteen years of age I killed a man, and found, in a murder undertaken for very definite reasons, a thrill beyond expectation. It was as though I had drunk at a wayside spring and found an elixir. That incident is unknown; the death of my father's foreman, Job Trevose, has not been understood till now. He lived at Paul, a village upon the heights nigh Penzance, and his walk to his work took him by the coast-guard track along lofty cliffs. Among the fish-curing sheds one day, unseen, I chanced to hear Trevose speak of my mother to another man and declare that she did evil and dishonoured my father.
From that moment I doomed Trevose to death and, some weeks later, after many failures to win the right conditions, caught him alone in a sea fog as he returned homeward. There was not a soul on the cliff path but ourselves; and he was a small man, I a strong, big boy. I walked beside him for fifty paces, then fell behind, leaped at his neck and hurled him over the cliff in an instant. One yell he gave and dropped six hundred feet. Then I fled over meadows inland and returned home after dark. Neither I nor anybody else was ever associated with the affair, and the death of Job Trevose has always been ascribed to misadventure--the easier to believe since he was not a temperate man.
From this experience I won, not remorse, but manhood. I rejoiced in what I had done. But I did not tell any living soul and only my wife ever heard the truth. Time passed and I proceeded with my life in normal fashion, learning myself and increasing my understanding of human nature. I was never under any domination of passion, but exercised great restraint and found that only by self-knowledge and self-command comes power. I did not seek forbidden fruit, but did not shun it. My life proceeded orderly; I chose the profession of dentist, as being likely to introduce me to people of a more interesting type than my father's acquaintance; and I kept an open mind for myself, but a shut mind for others.
