to me:
Dear as remembered kisses after Death,
Deep as true love and wild with all regret Oh, Death in life, the days that are no more!
As I sat there in the darkening office, tears poured from my eyes. So this is the end!
I crawled home: there, all by myself, I'd be able to plumb the disaster and learn its depth. For the first time in my life, I think, tears were rising in my heart and I was choking with the sense of man's mortality.
Tears, idle tears; I well know what they mean Tears from the depth of some divine despair.
Why 'divine'; why not accursed?
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes When looking at the happy autumn fields And thinking of the days that are no more Oh! Death in life! the days that are no more!
I would go home. And then a dreadful incident came back to me. One day, a long time before the World War, Meredith sent me a copy of Richard Feverel, all marked with corrections. In his letter he told me that he was setting himself to correct all his books for a final definitive edition. He wanted to know what I thought of the changes he had made. 'I think you will find them all emendations,' he wrote, 'but be frank with me, please, for you are almost the only man living whose judgment on such a matter would have weight with me. Morley, too, is a judge, but not of creative work, and as you have always professed a certain liking for Richard Feverel, I send that book for your opinion.'
Naturally I was touched and sat down to read, feeling sure that the alterations would be all emendations. But the first glances shocked me: he kept preferring the colorless word to the colorful. I went through the job with the utmost care. In some three hundred changes there were three of four I could approve; all the rest were changes for the worse. At once I got my car and drove down to Box Hill.
I came to the little house in the late afternoon and found Meredith had just got back from his donkey drive up the hill. He took me to his working room in the little chalet away from the house and we went at it hammer and tongs.
'You've put water in your ink,' I cried, 'and spoiled some of the finest pages in English. The courtship in the boat, even, you've worsened. For God's sake, stop and leave well, excellent-well, alone!'
At first he would not accept my opinion, so we went through the changes, one after the other. Hours flew by. 'How do you explain the fact,' he cried at last,
'that I'm still unconvinced, that in my heart you've not persuaded me?'
I had to speak out; there was nothing else for it.
'You are getting on,' I said. 'The creative power is leaving you, I fear. Please, please, forgive my brutal frankness!' I cried, for his face suddenly seemed to turn grey. 'You know, you must know how I reverence you and every word of this scene; the greatest love idyll in all literature is dear to me. It's greater than Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Don't alter a word, Master, please, not a word! They are all sacred!'
I don't know whether I persuaded him or not; I'm afraid not. As we grow older we grow more obstinate, and he said something once later about finding pleasure in correcting his early work.
But the fact remained fixed in my soul: Meredith had passed the great climacteric; he must have been about sixty-six and he had lost the faculty even of impartial judgment.
Had I lost it too? It seemed probable.
God, the bitterness of this death in life!
The days that are no more!
From that time on, I began to mention my age, make people guess it, women as well as men, but saw no comprehension, even in thoughtful women. If you are not bald and have no grey hairs-the stigmata of senility — you are all right in their opinion, all right! Oh, God!
Yet I soon found that my judgment had not lost its vigor. My virility had decreased, was never prompt to the act as before, but it was still there, and so long as I treasured it, did not spend it, the faculty of judgment was but little changed. My worst fear was groundless: total abstinence was a necessity unless-but that's another story or two.
The want of joy, even the shuddering mistrust of the enfeebled faculties, might be borne without complaint. The general health, however, everyone tells me, begins to suffer: catch a cold and you have rheumatic pains that are slow to cure; eat something that disagrees with you and you are ill not for a few hours, as in maturity, but for days and weeks, don't take exercise enough, or take a little too much, and you suffer like a dog. Nature becomes an importunate creditor who gives you no respite.
I remember years ago visiting Pitt House that stood on the top of Hampstead Heath. I wanted to know why it was called Pitt House: I found that the owner, hearing that Lord Chatham was in bad health, had placed the house at the great statesman's disposal, and ever afterwards it has been known as Pitt House. There the man went who had picked Wolfe and won an empire for Britain after scores of Parliamentary triumphs; there he passed his last days in profound loneliness and black melancholy. Tormented by gout, he used to sit by himself all day long in a little room without even a book, his heavy head upon his hand. He couldn't bear even the presence of his wife, though they had been lovers for many years; he would not even see a servant, but had a hatch cut in the wall so that he could take the meal placed outside on a slide, and, when he chose, push out the platter again and close the hatch against everybody. Think of it: he who had been for long years master of the world, whose rare appearances in the House of Commons had been triumphs, reduced to this condition of despairing solitude! That hatch in the wall was as significant to me as his great speech in defence of the American colonists.
That old age is usually embittered by bad health is true, I think, to most men, but not to me, thank God! I am as well now at nearly seventy as I ever was, better, indeed. I have learned how to keep perfectly well and shut the door in the face of old age and most of its Infirmities. Let me, for the benefit of others, tell the story here briefly.
On my third visit to South Africa in the late nineties, I caught black water fever, was deserted on the Chobe river by all my coolies, who thought the spirits had come to take me because I wandered in my speech and talked nonsense loudly. How I won to the sea and civilization in four months of delirium and starvation I shall tell at length when I come to it in the ordinary course. It's enough here to say that on the ship going back to Europe, the inside of my stomach came away in strips and pieces, and when I reached London I found myself a martyr to chronic Indigestion. I spent two years going from this celebrated doctor to that all over Europe-in vain. One made me live on grapes and another on vegetables and a third on nothing but meat, but I suffered almost continuously and became as thin as a skeleton.
My own doctor in London brought about the first improvement: he told me to give up smoking. I had smoked to excess all my life, but I stopped at once, though I must admit that no habit was ever so difficult to break off. A year later, if I caught the scent of a really good cigar, the water would come into my mouth, though I soon discovered that by giving up smoking all my food tasted better and fine wines developed flavors I had never before imagined.
Had I to live my life again, nothing would induce me to smoke. It is, I think, the worst of all habits, an enemy at once to pleasure and to health. But the indigestion held and made life a misery. Following Schweninger's advice (he had been Bismarck's doctor), I tried fasting for a fortnight at a time and derived some benefit from it, but not much.
One day my little London doctor advised me to try the stomach pump. The word frightened me, but I found it was only a syphon and not a pump. One had to push an india rubber tube down one's throat, pour a quart or so of warm water into the stomach through a funnel, depress the funnel below one's waist, and the water could come out, carrying with it all the impurities and undigested food. The first time I did it with the help of the doctor and the immediate relief cannot be described. From feeling extremely ill, I was perfectly well in a moment. I had got rid of the peas that the doctor had recommended and I could not help grinning as they came out with the water, proving that his prescription had been bad.
The next day I tried washing out again and soon found that my stomach would not digest bread and butter. No doctor had ever advised me to leave off eating bread and butter, but now the reason was clear. The black water fever had weakened my spleen and so I could not digest starchy things or fats.
In a week the stomach pump gave me a scientific dietary: I loved coffee, but coffee, I found, was poison to me, for it arrested digestion. Of course I left it off and avoided bread and butter, potatoes, etc., and at once my digestion began to do its work properly. For fifteen or twenty years now I have washed out my stomach nine days out of ten before going to bed, for every now and then I take too much butter or coffee or eat some grease-sodden
