"I should go right away at once," he said, "and go on with your a.r.s.enic.
And whatever you do--don"t worry--your wife is all right."
After beseeching him to keep silence about it as I thought she did not know, I shewed him out and locked up the certificate again.
Next morning I felt thoroughly cornered: I was not really fit enough to travel; my hand and leg were daily growing more and more paralysed and J---- wired to say she could not put me up as they were going away for the week end. So I wired back engaging rooms, as with the nurse in the house and E---- as she was, I simply could not stay at home....
On the way to the Station I was still in two minds whether or not to pull the taxi up at the Nursing Home and go inside, but hara.s.sing debate as it was, our rapidly diminishing bank balance finally drove me on.
---- came up to London with me and sought out a comfortable corner seat, but by the time the train left, a mother and a crying child had got in and everywhere else was full. A girl opposite who saw ---- hand me a brandy flask and knew I was ill, looked at me compa.s.sionately.
At Reading, another woman with a baby got in and both babies cried in chorus, jangling my nerves to bits!--until I got out into the corridor, by a miracle not falling down, with one leg very feeble and treacherous.
All seats were taken, excepting a first-cla.s.s compartment where I looked in enviously at a lucky youth stretched out asleep full length along the empty seat.
All the people and the noise of the train began to make me fret, so I sought out the repose of a lavatory where I remained eating sandwiches and an apple for the best part of an hour. It was good to be alone.
Later on, I discovered an empty seat in a compartment occupied by persons whose questionable appearance my short sight entirely failed to make me aware of until I got inside with them. They were a family of Sheenies, father, mother and three children, whose joint emanations in a closed-up railway carriage made an effluvium like to kill a regiment of guards. They were E. end p.a.w.nbrokers or dealers in second-hand clothes.
I was too nervous to appear rude by immediately with-drawing, so I said politely to the man clad in second-hand furs: "Is that seat taken?"
He affected to be almost asleep. So I repeated. He stared at me and then said:
"Oh! yes ... but you can have it for a bit if you like."
I sat down timorously on the extreme edge of the seat and stared at, but could not read, my newspaper out of sheer nervous apprehension. My sole idea was to get out as soon as I decorously could. Out of the corner of my eye, I observed the three children--two girls and a boy--all garbed in black clothes and wearing large clumsy boots with nails and scutes on the soles. The girls had large inflorescences of bushy hair which they swung about as they turned their heads and made me shudder. The mother"s face was like a brown, shrivelled apple, topped with a black bonnet and festooned on each side with ringlets of curly dark hair. Around her neck a fur tippet: as I live--second-hand clothes dealers from Whitechapel.
The man I dare not look at: I sat beside him and merely imagined.
At ----, I got a decent seat and arrived at T---- jaded, but still alive, with no one to meet me. Decent rooms on the sea-front.
Next morning J---- went away for the week end and I could not possibly explain how ill I was: she might have stayed at home.
To preserve my sanity, Sat.u.r.day afternoon, took a desperate remedy by hiring a motor-car and travelling to Torquay and back _via_ Babbacombe....
On the Sunday, feeling suddenly ill, I sent for the local medico whom I received in the drab little room by lamplight after dinner. "I"ve a tingling in my right hand," I said, "that drives me nearly silly."
"And on the soles of your feet?" he asked at once.
I a.s.sented, and he ran thro" at once all the symptoms in series.
"I see you know what my trouble is," I said shyly. And we chatted a little about the War, about disease, and I told him of the recent memoir on the histology of the disease ---- in the _Trans. Roy. Soc_, Edin.
which interested him. Then he went away again--very amiable, very polite --an obvious _non possumus_....
On Monday at 4 went up to ---- to tea as previously arranged, but found the house shut up so returned to my rooms in a rage.
After tea, having read the newspapers inside out, sat by the open window looking out on to the Marine Parade. It was dusk, a fine rain was falling, and the parade and sea-front were deserted save for an occasional figure hurrying past with mackintosh and umbrella. Suddenly as I sat looking out on this doleful scene, a dirge from nowhere in particular sounded on my ears which I soon recognised as "Robin Adair,"
sung very _lento_ and very _maestoso_ by a woman, with a flute obligato played by some second person. The tide was right up, and the little waves murmured listlessly at long intervals: never before I think have I been plunged into such an abyss of acute misery.
Next day the wire came. But it was too late. The day after that, I was worse, a single ray of sunshine being the rediscovery of the second-hand-clothes family from Whitechapel taking the air together on the front. This dreary party was traipsing along, the parents in their furs giving an occasional glance at the sea uncomfortably, as if they only noticed it was wet, and the children still in black and still wearing their scuted boots, obviously a little uncomfortable in a place so clean and windswept. I think they all came to the seaside out of decorum and for the satisfaction of feeling that they could afford it like other folk, and that old-clothes was as profitable a business as another.
On Thursday, returned home as I was afraid of being taken ill and having to go into the public hospital. Arrived home and went to bed and here we are till Jan. 1st on 3 months" sick leave. However, the swingeing urtication in my hands and feet has now almost entirely abated and to-day I went out with E---- and the perambulator, _which I pushed_.
_December_ 13.
_A Baby-Girl_
Walked down the bottom of the road and hung over some wooden railings. A little village baby-girl aged not more than 3 was hovering about near me while I gazed abstractedly across the Park at the trees. Presently, she crawled through the railings into the field and picked up a few dead leaves--a baby picking up dead leaves! Then she threw them down, and kicked them. Then moved on again--rustling about intermittently like a winter Thrush in the shrubbery. At last, she had stumbled around to where I was leaning over the railings. She stood immediately in front of me and silently looked up with a steady reproachful gaze: "Ain"t you "shamed, you lazy-bones?" till I could bear her inquisitorial gaze no longer, and so went and hung over some more railings further on.
_Service_
He asked for a Tennyson. She immediately went upstairs in the dark, lit a match and got it for him.
He asked for a Shakespeare. And without a moment"s hesitation, she went upstairs again, lit another match and got that for him.
And I believe if he had said "Rats," she would have shot out silently into the dark and tried to catch one for him. Only a woman is capable of such service.
_Hardy"s Poetry_
"You did not come, And marching time drew on and wore me numb-- Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compa.s.sion which can overbear Reluctance for pure loving-kindness" sake Grieved I, _when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum_, You did not come."
I thoroughly enjoy Hardy"s poetry for its masterfulness, for his sheer muscular compulsion over the words and sentences. In his rough-hewn lines he yokes the recalcitrant words together and drives them along mercilessly with something that looks like simple brute strength.
Witness the triumphant last line in the above where the words are absolute bondslaves to his exact meaning, his indomitable will. All this pleases me the more for I know to my cost what stubborn, sullen, hephaestian beasts words and clauses can sometimes be. It is nice to see them punished. Hardy"s poetry is Michael Angelo rather than Greek, Browning not Tennyson.
_December_ 14.
What a day! After a night of fog signals, I awoke this morning to find it still foggy and the ground covered with a grey rime. All day the fog has remained: I look out now thro" the yellowish atmosphere across a field which is frosted over, the gra.s.s and brambles stiff and gla.s.sy. My back is aching and the cold is so intense that unless I crouch over the fire hands and feet become immediately stone-cold. All day I have crouched over the fire, reading newspapers, listening to fog signals and the screaming of the baby.... I have been in a torpor, like a Bat in a cavern--really dead yet automatically hanging on to life by my hind legs.
_December_ 15.
"To stand upon one"s guard against Death exasperates her malice and protracts our sufferings." W.S. Landor.
_December_ 19.
The Parson called, over the christening of the baby. I told him I was an agnostic. "There are several interesting lines of thought down here," he said wearily, pa.s.sing his hand over his eyes. I know several men more enthusiastic over Fleas and Worms than this phlegmatic priest, over Jesus Christ.
_December_ 20.
The reason why I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I therefore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan"t get it: my own profound self-compa.s.sion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close. Pray G.o.d the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.
We all like to dramatise ourselves. Byron was dramatising himself when, in a fit of rhetorical self-compa.s.sion, he wrote:
"Oh! could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been, Or weep as I could once have wept o"er many a vanished scene."
Sh.e.l.ley, too, being an artist could not stand insensible to his own tragedy and Francis Thompson suggests that he even antic.i.p.ated his own end from a pa.s.sage in _Julian and Maddalo_, "... if you can"t swim, Beware of Providence." "Did no earthly _dixisti_," Thompson asks, "sound in his ears as he wrote it?"
In any event, it was an admirable ending from the dramatic point of view; Destiny is often a superb dramatist. What more perfect than the death of Rupert Brooke at Scyros in the aegean?[6] The lives of some men are works of art, perfect in form, in development and in climax. Yet how frequently a life eminently successful or even eminently ruinous is also an unlovely, sordid, ridiculous or vulgar affair! Every one will concede that it must be a hard thing to be commonplace and vulgar even in misfortune, to discover that the tragedy of your own precious life has been dramatically bad, that your life even in its ruins is but a poor thing, and your own miseries pathetic from their very insignificance; that you are only Jones with chronic indigestion rather than Guy de Maupa.s.sant mad, or Coleridge with a great intellect being slowly dismantled by opium.
If only I could order my life by line and level, if I could control or create my own destiny and mould it into some marble perfection! In short, if life were an art and not a lottery! In the lives of all of us, how many wasted efforts, how many wasted opportunities, false starts, blind--how many lost days--and man"s life is but a paltry three score years and ten: pitiful short commons indeed.