One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him;when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth.The fury of a demon instantly possessed me.I knew myself no longer.My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket!I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.
When reason returned with the morning—when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty;but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.
In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain.He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach.I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me.But this feeling soon gave place to irritation.And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS.Of this spirit philosophy takes no account.Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow.It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong's sake only—that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.