It is so agreeable to be able to write again that I write now for the sheer physical pleasure of being able to use a pen and form letters.
An Adventure in Search of Health
About the end of September, I began to feel so ill that Nurse went for the Doctor who assured me that E⸺ was all right—I need not worry—“You go away at once and get some fresh air,” and so forth. “I feel quite ill,” I said, struggling to break the news.
“Sort of nervous?” he enquired good-naturedly, “run down? I should get right away at once.”
I began tentatively. “Well, I have a rather long medical history and perhaps … you … might care to read the certificate of my London Doctor?”
I went to my escritoire and returned with M⸺’s letter addressed to “The M.O. examining Mr. B.”
Hodge pulled out the missive, studied the brief note carefully and long, at the same time drawing in his breath—deeply, and gnawing the back of his hand.
“I know all about it,” I said to relieve him.
“Is it quite certain? about this disease?” he said presently. “You are very young for it.”
“I think there is no doubt,” and he began to put me through the usual tricks.
“I should go right away at once,” he said, “and go on with your arsenic. 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 showed 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 weekend. 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 harassing 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 compassionately.
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-class 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 pawnbrokers or dealers in secondhand clothes.
I was too nervous to appear rude by immediately withdrawing, so I said politely to the man clad in secondhand 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—secondhand 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 seafront.
Next morning J⸺ went away for the weekend and I could not possibly explain how ill I was: she might have stayed at home.
To preserve my sanity, Saturday afternoon, took a desperate remedy by hiring a motorcar 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 assented, and he ran through at once all the symptoms in
