Am spending my summer holidays in the Lakes at Coniston with G⸺ and R⸺. … I am simply consumed with pride at being among the mountains at last! It is an enormous personal success to have arrived at Coniston!
all its little parts. I have even pursued the Louse into ancient literature and have read old medical treatises about it, as, for example, the De Phthiriasi of Gilbert de Frankenau. Mucius the lawgiver died of this disease so also did the Dictator Scylla, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Maximilian, the philosopher Pherecydes, Philip II of Spain, the fugitive Ennius, Callisthenes, Alcman and many other distinguished people including the Emperor Arnauld in 899. In 955, the Bishop of Noyon had to be sewn up in a leather sack before he could be buried.20 In Mexico and Peru, a poll-tax of Lice was exacted and bags of these treasures were found in the Palace of Montezuma.21 In the United Service Magazine for 184222 is an account of the wreck of the Wager, a vessel found adrift, the crew in dire straits and Captain Cheap lying on the deck—“like an anthill.”
So that as an ancient writer puts it, “you must own that for the quelling of human pride and to pull down the high conceits of mortal man, this most loathsome of all maladies (Pediculosis) has been the inheritance of the rich, the wise, the noble and the mighty—poets, philosophers, prelates, princes, Kings and Emperors.”
In his well-known Bridgewater Treatise, the Rev. Dr. Kirby, the Father of English Entomology, asked: “Can we believe that man in his pristine state of glory and beauty and dignity could be the receptacle of prey so loathsome as these unclean and disgusting creatures?”23 He therefore dated their creation after the Fall.
The other day a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to see me on a lousy matter, and presently drew some live Lice from his waistcoat pocket for me to see. They were contained in pill boxes with little bits of muslin stretched across the open end through which the Lice could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed belt and at night ties the belt around his waist and all night sleeps in Elysium. He is not married.
In this fashion, he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even hybridised the two different species!
In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers prejudice.
Climbed a windy eminence on the other side of the Lake and had a splendid view of Helvellyn—like a great hog’s back. It is fine to walk over the elastic turf with the wind bellowing into each ear and swirling all around me in a mighty sea of air until I was as clean-blown and resonant as a seashell. I moved along as easily as a disembodied spirit and felt free, almost transparent. The old earth seemed to have soaked me up into itself, I became dissolved into it, my separate body was melted away from me, and Nature received me into her deepest communion—until, until I got on the lee side of a hedge where the calm brought me back my gaol of clay.
Fourteen days hence I shall be a married man. But I feel most dejected about it. When I fell down the other day, I believe I slightly concussed my spinal column, with the result that my 1913 trouble has returned, but this time on the left side! paralysis and horrible vertigo and presentiments of sudden collapse as I walk.
I fear I have been overdoing it in this tempting mountain region. Walking too far, etc. So I am slacking. It was fortunate I did not get concussion of the brain—I came within an inch of it: the hair of my head brushed the ground.
A Buxom Rogue in Earthenware
I knocked at the door of Sunbeam Cottage the other morning to know if they had a boat for hire. The door was promptly opened by a plump, charming little wench of about 17, and I caught a glimpse of the kitchen with its gunrack holding two fowling pieces, a grandfather clock in one corner and a dresser full of blueish china.
“We don’t let our boat out for hire,” she answered with a smile so honest and natural and spontaneous that I was already saying to myself I had never met with anything like it at all when she stretched up her bare, dairymaid arm—strong, creamy and soft, just reached a big key strung to a wooden block and lying on the top shelf of the dresser and at once handed it to me with:
“But you are quite welcome to use it and here is the key to the boathouse.”
I now felt certain that she was one in a million and thanked her most awfully. I have never met such swiftly-moving generosity.
“It’s very nice on the Lake just now,” she said. “I like to lie in the boat with a book and let her drift.”
I asked her if she would not come too, but this tight little fairy was too busy in the house. She is Clara Middleton done in earthenware.
Subsequently R⸺ and I often visited the cottage and we became great friends, her mother showing us some letters she received as a girl from John Ruskin—a great friend of hers. The gamekeeper himself said that for his part he could never read Ruskin’s books—it was like driving a springless cart over a rocky road. We all laughed and I said he was prejudiced in view of the letters which began: “My darling,” and finished up “Yr loving J. R.”
But Mrs. ⸻ said he had never
Вы читаете The Journal of a Disappointed Man
