out, made me feel inside quite a bright young dog wriggling its body in ecstatic delight let loose upon the green sward.
“You must come down for a weekend,” I said to R⸺ at lunch. “Come down as soon as you can. You will find every comfort. It is an enormous house—I have not succeeded in finding my way about it and—it’s dangerous to lose yourself—makes you late for dinner. When you arrive our gilded janitor will say: ‘I believe Mr. Barbellion is in the library.’ ”
“Black eunuchs wait on you at dinner, I suppose,” R⸺ rejoined.
“Oh! yes and golden chandeliers and a marble staircase—all in barbaric splendour.”
“Yes, I shall certainly be glad to come down,” said R⸺, phlegmatically.
And so on and so on. Words, idle words all day in a continuous rush. And I am sure that the match which fired the gunpowder was the discovery of the de Goncourts’ Journal! It’s extraordinary how I have been going on from week to week quite calmly for all the world as if I had read all the books and seen all the places and done everything according to the heart’s desire. This book has really jolted me out of my complacency: to think that all this time, I have been dead to so much! Why I might have died unconscious that the de Goncourts had ever lived and written their colossal book and now I am aware of it, I am all in a fever to read it and take it up into my brain: I might die now before I have finished it—a thought that makes me wild with desire just as I once endured most awful pangs when I felt my health going, and believed that I might die before having ever been in love—to die and never to have been in love!—for an instant at a time this possibility used to make me writhe.
R⸺ has an unpleasant habit of making some scarifying announcement drawing forth an explosive query from me and then lapsing at once into an Eleusinian silence: he appears to take a sensuous pleasure in the pause that keeps you expectant. I could forgive a man who keeps you on tenterhooks for two puffs in order to keep his pipe alight, but R⸺ shuts up out of sheer self-indulgence and goes on gazing at the horizon with the eyes of a seer (he thinks) trying to cod me he sees a portent there only revealed to God’s elect.
I told him this in the middle of one of his luxurious silences. “I will tell you,” he said deliberately, “when we reach the Oratory.” (We were in Brompton Road.)
“Which side of it?” I enquired anxiously. “This or that?”
“That,” said he, “will depend on how you behave in the meantime.”
We met a remarkable Bulldog today in the street, humbly following behind a tiny boy to whom it was attached by a piece of string. At the time we were following in the wake of three magnificent Serbian Officers, and I was particularly interesting myself in the curious cut of their top boots. But the Bulldog was the Red Herring in our path.
“Is that a Dog?” I asked the little boy.
He assured me that it was, and so it turned out to be, though Bullfrog would have been a better name for it, the forelegs being more bandied, the back broader and the mouth wider than in any Bulldog I have ever seen. It was a super-Bulldog.
We turned and walked on. “There,” said R⸺, “now we have lost our Serbian Officers.”
“May I use your microscope?” he asked.
“By all means,” I said with a gesture of elaborate politeness.
He sat down at my table, in my chair, and used my instrument—becoming at once absorbed and oblivious to my banter as per below:
“As Scotchmen,” I said, “are monuments rather than men, this latest raid on Edinboro’s worthy inhabitants must be called vandalism rather than murder.”
No answer. I continued to stand by my chair.
“How pleased Swift, Johnson, Lamb, and other anti-Caledonians would be. …”
“Hope you don’t mind my occupying your chair a little longer,” the Scotchman said, “but this is a larva, has curious maxillae. …” and his voice faded away in abstraction.
“Oh! no—go on,” I said, “I fear it is a grievous absence of hospitality on my part in not providing you with a glass of whiskey. Can I offer you water, Sir?”
No answer.
Another enthusiast ushered himself in, was greeted with delight by the first and invited to sit down. I pulled out a chair for him and said:
“Shave, sir, or hair cut?”
“If you follow along to the top of the galea,” No. I droned on imperturbably, “you will. …” etc.
I got tired of standing and talking to an empty house but at last they got up, apologising and making for the door.
I entreated them not to mention the matter—my fee should be nominal—I did it out of sheer love, etc.
They thanked me again and would have said more but I added blandly:
“You know your way out?” They assured me they did (having worked in the place for 30 years and more)—I thanked God—and sat down to my table once more.
(These reports of conversations are rather fatuous: yet they give an idea of the sort of person I have to deal with, and also the sort of person I am among this sort of person.)
The Housefly Problem—1916
For weeks past we have all been in a terrible flutter scarcely paralleled by the outbreak of Armageddon in August, 1914. The spark which fired almost the whole building was a letter to the Times written by Dr. ⸻, making public an ignominious confession of ignorance on the part of Entomologists as to how the Housefly passed the winter. In reply, many correspondents wrote to say they hibernated, and one man was even so temerarious as to quote to us Entomologists the exact Latin name of the
