seaside laboratory, and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat of the newspaper world seems very hard, and it is very hard.
Windy Ash
With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter’s morning—a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth—a luminant, not a fire—the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great wisps of cloud in the sky like comets’ tails. Everything cold, crystalline.
1911
As a young man—a very young man—my purpose was to plough up all obstacles, brook no delays, and without let or hindrance win through to an almost immediate success! But witness 1910! “My career” so far has been like the White Knight’s, who fell off behind when the horse started, in front when it stopped, and sideways occasionally to vary the monotony.
Feeling ill and suffering from attacks of faintness. My ill health has produced a change in my attitude towards work. As soon as I begin to feel the least bit down, I am bound to stop at once as the idea of bending over a desk or a dissecting dish, of reading or studying, nauseates me when I think that perhaps tomorrow or next day or next week, next month, next year I may be dead. What a waste of life it seems to work! Zoology is repugnant and philosophy superfluous beside the bliss of sheer living—out in the cold polar air or indoors in a chair before a roaring fire with hands clasped, watching the bustling, soothing activity of the flames.
Then, as soon as I am well again, I forget all this, grow discontented with doing nothing and work like a Tiger.
Walked in the country. Coming home, terrified by a really violent attack of palpitation. Almost everyone I met I thought would be the unfortunate person who would have to pick me up. As each one in the street approached me, I weighed him in the balance and considered if he had presence of mind and how he would render first aid. After my friend, P.C. ⸻, had passed, I felt sorry that the tragedy had not already happened, for he knows me and where I live. At length, after sundry leanings over the river wall, arrived at the Library, which I entered, and sat down, when the full force of the palpitation was immediately felt. My face burned with the hot blood, my hand holding the paper shook with the angry pulse, and my heart went bang! bang! bang! and I could feel its beat in the carotids of the neck and up along the Torcular herophili and big vessels in the occipital region of the head. Drew in each breath very gently for fear of aggravating the fiend. Got home (don’t know how) and had some sal volatile. Am better now but very demoralised.
Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short—ill.
After some days with the vision of sudden death constantly before me, have come to the conclusion that it’s a long way to go to die. Am coming back anyhow. Yet these are a few terrible pages in my history.
… The Doctor’s orders “Cease Work” have brought on in an aggravated form my infatuation for zoological research. I lie in bed and manufacture rolling periods in praise of it, I get dithyrambic over the zoologists themselves—Huxley, Wallace, Brooks, Lankester. I chortle to reflect that in zoology there are no stock exchange ambitions, there is no mention of slum life, Tariff Reform is not included. In the repose of the spacious laboratory by the seaside or in the halls of some great Museum, life with its vulgar struggles, its hustle and obscenity, scarcely penetrates. Behind those doors, life flows slowly, deeply. I am ascetic and long for the monastic seclusion of a student’s life.
From One Maiden Lady to Another. (Authentic)
“My dear Sister—You have been expecting to hear from me I know, I have had inflammation to my eyes twice in three weeks so I thought I had better let the Doctor see and he says it is catarrh of the eyes and windpipe. I am inhaling and taking lozenges and medicine. You will be sorry to learn Leonora Mims has been taken to a Sanatorium with Diphtheria, we heard yesterday, she is better, poor Mrs. Mims herself quite an invalid, she has to walk with a stick, I believe you know she has had to have her breast cut off, they keep a servant as she can’t do anything, old Mrs. Point is eighty-seven I think it is so they too have a lot of trouble, Fred Mims has just got married. …
“Poor old Mrs. Seemsoe is just the same, she doesn’t know anybody but she talks, the nurse put a grape in her mouth but she didn’t know what to do with it, I think it is very sad. She was taken about a fortnight before Easter. Will you tell me dear if this is right receipt for clothes ½ oz. carbolic in ½ pint of rose water. Harry Gammon’s two little children have measles, poor Maisie has gone with her Aunt Susan, poor old Joe Gammon they say had very little to leave, we don’t
