From 1903 to 1906 illness removed me from most activities. The illness was purely imaginary; that made it none the better. It was enhanced by wickedly unskilful doctoring. In those days I wandered from nerve cure to nerve cure, all over England, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Belgium – but mostly in Germany. I suffered from what was diagnosed as agoraphobia and intense depression. I had nothing specific to be depressed about. But the memory of those years is one of uninterrupted mental agony. Nothing marks them off one from the other. They were lost years.
One single picture comes back to me. I had been trying a nerve cure on the Lake of Constance. I had taken ninety cold baths and thirty tepid soda-water douches in thirty days. I was so weak that, even if the so-called agoraphobia had not interfered with my walking I should hardly have been able to get about. I had determined to pull myself together and had gone to Bâle to write a life of Holbein.
I wrote it in the house of a Swiss professor. He had lost his only daughter and could not bear the silence of his immensely tall, gloomy, ancient and crowstepped house. He had filled it with clocks – every imaginable type of Swiss clock. There was thus a continual ticking, striking, chiming and cuckooing whilst the poor man continually wept. The noise of the clocks was not disagreeable but the gloom of the house was profound. I worked in a room high in the gable. The upper stories of the houses in that street jutted forward so as to come very close together. Immediately opposite me lived a chimney sweep. He was jet black all over, wore a top hat and carried behind his back a ladder and sacks of soot. His apartment which I could see into contained a baby and a blonde pink and white young wife. Apartment, baby and wife were all spotless. On the edge of the window-sill was a little green and white fence with fuchsias in pots behind it. On one side of the window hung a canary in a cage, on the other a goldfinch. The chimney sweeper never came home till dusk. By then the lights would be lit behind a white blind. Then the silhouette of the sweep, framed by the window; in the black house-front that, itself a silhouette, stood out with crockets and crowsteps against the dark sky and the immense stars.
He would stride joyously into the room. His shadow would catch the shadow of the baby from the invisible cradle and, top hat, ladder, sacks all bobbing, he would throw the baby up to the ceiling, again and again and again. I used to hang out over my window-sill and wonder why God had made it impossible to transfuse one’s soul into another being. If only I could have made mine enter that chimney sweep’s body whilst his was absent in sleep! His could no doubt have found a home.
I gave up Holbein and Bâle and went down the Rhine to a Kaltwasser-Heilanstalt that seemed to me the most horrible of all the monstrous institutions that had tortured me. They fed you there on pork and ice-cream. On the Lake of Constance they had fed me on dried peas and grapes – one grape every quarter of an hour – for sixteen hours out of the day. The director of the Kaltwasser-Heilanstalt was an immense, thin man with a long grey waterfall of beard through which he passed his fingers as if cautiously before he ever made a remark. He usually wore black spectacles. In the effort to prove that my troubles had an obscure sexual origin he would suddenly produce from his desk and flash before my eyes indecent photographs of a singular banality. He expected me to throw fits or to faint. I didn’t.
In Austria, in an institution that is now even more famous than the Rhineland K.W.H.A. they had attempted to demonstrate the same thing with much the same primitive means and with similar unsuccess. One day my soul straightener had a ray of hope.
I had a friend in England who had had a child. He wanted me to be its godfather: I could not because he was Anglican. But I wanted to send the child a christening cup. As I had been going to the institution I had been into several jewellers’ shops but could not see the kind of cup I wanted. At last, near the Kärntnerthor I had seen a very pretty, delicate cup in gold. I thought that silver was de rigueur for christenings. I was not certain that I could afford the gold one. I wondered if I could not have that golden cup reproduced in silver.
I was thinking about the golden cup in the ante-room of the nerve-specialist where I had to wait a long time and felt extremely melancholy. He put his head suddenly around the door and asked menacingly:
‘Uber was speculieren Sie?’
I said innocently and without premeditation:
‘Eine goldene Tasse, Herr Wirklicher Geheimrath!’
His face lit up with the pleasure of cross-examining counsel who had caught out a hostile witness.
‘Kurz und gut,’ he said, ‘you are suffering from …’ some sexual disorder or other. As a matter of fact I was suffering from a slight fluttering of the heart which, after periods of intense overwork and fatigue, caused – and indeed does still cause – me to feel slightly faint for a second or two. This will naturally sometimes happen in the street. The result therefore a little resembles agoraphobia which is in effect a disease of the will-power and may be attributable to sexual disorders – but which equally well may not.
Those were the early days of that mania that has since beset the entire habitable globe. I went in those three years to nineteen specialists, all of them famous in their nations and some world famous. Not one of them examined my heart; everyone diagnosed my trouble as agoraphobia; sixteen or seventeen of them attributed it to sexual abnormalities and treated me for them. I am however bound to say for the Austrian practitioner that I explained to him exactly why I was thinking about a golden cup. He then abandoned his theory. I ought to say that, in those days – and I daresay it still is – a golden cup was regarded by those enthusiasts as a symbol of something improper. I use the last two words on purpose. I suppose the choice of the emblem is a hit at the Holy Grail.
The result of the efforts of these specialists was to reduce me in weight to nine stone two – 128 lbs. I am exactly six foot in height. When I went to New York next year the Herald had a caricature of me subscribed as: The Animated Match.
The Rhineland Kaltwasser-Heilanstalt was the last institution of the sort that I endured. It was a vast, gloomy building, the former palace of a Kurfüst of sorts. I was fed on pork and ice-cream and salad made with lemon juice and white of egg, Oil and vinegar are said to be exciting – sexually. Three times a day I had alternately a boiling shampoo and a fliessende Fussbad – a foot-bath of iced water forced against the feet in a stream running ninety miles an hour. The Dr Kaltwasser-Heilanstaltiger Medizinrath had by then come to the conclusion that my trouble was due to defective circulation. The blood had to be forced to my head by boiling it and then back to my feet by the reaction from their being frozen. It was a good idea but I lost weight. Then complete sleeplessness came to add itself to my pleasures.
My mother came out to me. She had been warned by the Geheimrath and members of my family who resided in the town overshadowed by the Heilanstalt that my case was desperate. For four nights running she read to me from Boswell’s Johnson – through the entire night. She read on even when I dozed off.
There were two adorably old-maidish maiden ladies from Stamford, Conn. in the Heilanstalt. During the day whilst my mother slept they took me over, telling me of the glories of America before the Revolution. They were Tories, they told me. Their father had been horribly tortured because of his loyalty. Their drawing-room at home was decorated with portraits of General Braddock and Lord Cornwallis. American drawing-rooms they said were usually decorated with portraits of Washington and Franklin. I knew of course that they were not. Their pre-Revolutionary frame-house stood under enormous elms on the spot now occupied by the Ambassadoor – it is pronounced like that presumably to rhyme with Commodore – apartment building. I re-located it the other day. It is a pity they had to cut down the elms. There is much too little timber in New England.
Miss Hurlbird and her sister, in the immense, shadowed drawing-room of the Heilanstalt promised me that if I would visit them at Stamford and eat their peaches and frozen cream for breakfast I should be restored to complete health. I eventually did so and the promise came true. It was not, you understand, ice-cream, but fresh cream frozen thick and eaten with fresh peaches, peeled and cut in half.
At the time I said that I did not suppose I should ever see fresh peaches again. It was getting on to be the week before Christmas – 1904 I should think. I had lost all count of time and cannot now recapture those years. Then the doctor heard that my mother was reading all night to me. He forbade her to read to me later than ten. I had to face the thought that I should not any more go strolling down Fleet Street with the Doctor rolling and muttering and fingering the post-tops. Perhaps still more I regretted that I might never again meet the fellow who said that he tried hard to be a philosopher but cheerfulness would come creeping in. I always imagined he must have been an ancestor of my own. I said: ‘That finishes it.’ To have to face nightly ten hours of sleepless agony was more than I could endure. I told the doctor that I was going back to London for Christmas. He said: ‘You will probably die if you do,’ and added that even if I did not die he would not again receive me amongst his patients. Even that consideration did not deter me.
When I got to London Conrad begged me to see his family doctor – Tebb. I hope Tebb is still practising and may thus receive an advertisement that the British Medical Association would prevent his giving himself. He was the only doctor I ever heard of who always cured his patients at one sitting – or told them they were incurable. He nearly starved. Doctors must not cure patients at one sitting if they are themselves to live. I last heard of him during the war. He was managing a Government hospital for consumptives.
He was the most mournful looking man I have ever imagined. He was thinner than seemed possible – thinner than myself! He wore extremely powerful glasses that dilated his eyes to extravagant dimensions. He could cure all his patients but he had at home a child he could not cure. It was a most tragic story.
He came into the room where I lay. My uncle William Rossetti who was away from London had lent me his house for the winter. I was lying on the sofa on which Shelley had passed the last night of his life. The room was a museum of Shelleyan and pre-Raphaelite relics. Tebb with his stethoscope in his top hat was like a ghost.
He sat beside me for more than two hours. He hardly spoke at all. Now and then he asked a question. It was as if his voice came from a tomb. My mind was full of finishing my life of Holbein that had been interrupted at Bâle. The Wirklicher Sanitäts Rath had told me that if I worked at it I should die. My mother had brought me out a copy of one of my books. It had seemed to me stupendous that I could ever have written a book. This one had been published just after the beginning of my illness and I had never seen it. It seemed to me that if I could write another book I should at least have justified my existence.
After Tebb had been silent for an hour and a half I said:
‘Doctor, I know I am going to die. Mayn’t I finish a book I have begun?’
‘What book?’ he asked cavernously. I said it was a life of Holbein.
Half an hour afterwards he said:
‘Yes, you may as well finish your life of Holbein if you have time. You will be dead in a month.’ He said it with a hollow and mournful vindictiveness that still rings in my ears. He told me to go to Winchelsea to do that work. If I was alive at the end of a month I could come and see him again. He went away, leaving no prescription.
As soon as he was gone I jumped up, dressed myself and all alone took a hansom to Piccadilly Circus. You are to remember that my chief trouble was that I imagined that I could not walk. Well, I walked backwards and forwards across the Circus for an hour and a half. I kept on saying: ‘Damn that brute. I will not be dead in a month.’ And walking across the Circus through the traffic was no joke. Motors are comparatively controllable but the traffic then was mostly horse-drawn and horses in motion are much more difficult to check than automobiles.
That afternoon – or almost immediately afterwards – I went down to Winchelsea. I was accompanied by Mr Walter Jerrold, the grandson of Douglas of that name. Mr Jerrold was a good and patient friend to me. He became annoyed with me because, afterwards, I did not offer him the sub-editorship of the English Review. I should have done so but I thought he was too important and valuable a literary man to be offered a sub-editorship. I never saw him after that. There are many ways of losing friends.
In the company of Mr Jerrold I all but finished the Holbein book down in the winter silence of Winchelsea. I still suffered a good deal from depression but as I could take a good deal of exercise I slept well. I ate hardly anything. One day in desperation I ate a hearty meal of ham and eggs. To my astonishment the depression temporarily disappeared. I did not then take the hint. But I plugged away stalwartly at Holbein. I was determined to justify my existence… I may say that an artist who was reading the book only a week ago tells me that I shall not certainly be justified by that alone. That is probably true.
At the end of the month I saw Tebb again. I said triumphantly:
‘You see, I am not dead.’
He answered as mournfully and hollowly as if he were in despair at the falsification of his prophecy:
‘If I hadn’t told you you would be dead you would have been dead.’ He was no doubt right.
I am recounting this medical history for the benefit of poor souls who may be passing through similar experiences. So I hasten to say that from that day to this – except for the inevitable happenings of the late war – I have never spent a day in bed. Doctors have occasionally ordered me to and I have tried to obey but I never managed to get beyond four p.m.
I have all my life been incapable of inaction. I could count on my fingers – on the fingers of one hand – the number of hours’ rest, sitting in a chair, that I have taken this year. I must work. And I think no department of human labour below me. I would as soon wash dishes for the household as cook and as soon cook as read a book unless it be extraordinary – or a really ingenious detective story.
By analogy, I suppose, I have the profound conviction that there is nothing I could not do if I tried – supposing it to be humanly possible. And, at that, if you really got it home to my conviction that I could not do something impossible I should certainly have a try at it and be very mortified at failure. Of course I am not good at higher mathematics
I do not think I would even change the period of overwork in that London mausoleum of 1903. It cut two or three years out of my life, but I do not know what I should have done with them and it probably hardened my character. I had neither aims nor strong motives before that. I have had some since.
So, if I had to advise, I should say: ‘Work yourself all out, to the limit of your passion for activities. Then take what you get for it.’ Doctors will not advise you to do that – but then doctors look for the large profits that come to them with quickish – but not too quick – returns. I broke down pretty badly after a period of fantastic overwork, but, since then I have emerged pretty scatheless from periods of overwork that would have wrecked men not so tested. When I had the English Review, when I was interested simultaneously in the Suffragette Movement and in the Irish Theatre, when I was in the Army and at the same time wrote propaganda for both the French and British Governments, when I had the Transatlantic Review and simultaneously wrote a series of long novels about the war – all those were periods of really extreme strenuousness. They had however less of attendant mental strain than I had to endure on Campden Hill in 1903.
Then, as I have said, I used to breakfast very frequently with Mr Galsworthy. I breakfasted indeed as frequently as he would let me. That was more for the mental relaxation than for the faultless and shining meals that come to me always as having taken place in sunlight falling through the doorway of his stable. But indeed to come in contact with the young man about London Town, with his moderate and easy views, his moderate, easy and perfectly appointed mode of life, his amiable insouciance and his kindly interest in all the Arts – that was for me something remote and like a fairy tale. It has remained unique. I never knew at all well any other member of the English leisured class.
I broke my friendship with him – I daresay to his relief – over a public matter. It was a matter about which I have always been a little mad – the question of the humane slaughtering of cattle. Or rather it was the question of how to bring about legislation enforcing the humane slaughter of cattle in Great Britain over which we differed.
Just before the war I spent a good deal of time in Belgium, near the German frontier. There was then at Spa a queer, heavy, retired English Lancer captain called Campbell. He was not otherwise distinguished by any great appearance of intelligence. But he deserves to be remembered and honoured along with St. Francis of the Birds and when the cattle at midnight on Christmas Eve talk from stall to stall and in the byres, surely they remember his name. He was the apostle of the four-footed dumb beasts.
It was impossible to understand how he did it. I toured with him a good deal of Belgium, notably in the Ardennes which is famous for its hams. He had no French, no Flemish, no signs. He was more inarticulate than you would believe possible, even in his own tongue. But he carried a thermometer and a sort of blunderbuss. Exhibiting these with a series of grunts to the pig-slaughterers of the Ardennes, the ox-butchers of Flanders and the sheep-killers of the Walloon districts, he succeeded in getting all their suffrages for a bill in the Belgian parliament. It made the slaughtering of cattle by as humane a process as is humanly possible obligatory in Belgium. He did this almost completely single-handed.
In, I think, 1913, I introduced him to C. F. G. Masterman, who had been touring South Germany with me. He was looking for details of the German State Insurance Scheme in order to amend the measure of State Insurance that the Liberal Government were passing through the House of Commons. We had been up the Rhine, in Bavaria, in Metz, in Trêves and had finally arrived at Spa.
Masterman was at least as much impressed by Captain Campbell as I was. His extraordinary passion burning through a heavy and slow body was something hardly to be believed in. Masterman too made a tour of inspection of the model abattoirs that Campbell had induced the Ardennes ham-curers to erect. Eventually that Minister not only facilitated Campbell’s return to England – Campbell was rather poor and had exhausted most of his resources in his campaign – but promised to give Government support to a measure for humane slaughtering if Campbell could obtain in turn the support of British humanitarian societies.
Campbell came to England. I wrote a letter to The Times putting Campbell’s arguments for him. The Times did not print it but the Government organs did. Masterman lent Campbell someone – I suppose a drafter – to help him in preparing the Bill. I then wrote to Mr Galsworthy asking him to obtain the support of the various humane societies of which he was a distinguished member. Mr Galsworthy replied that Captain Campbell would receive no support from them. His Bill might even be opposed in Parliament by the societies like the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Masterman then withdrew his promise of Government support. The Bill was dropped.
To understand this it is necessary to know a little of the English Parliamentary system. A Government Bill stands or falls as a Government stands or falls. Private measures depend for their passage on the introducers being able to get behind them certain interests that may or may not be affected by the proposed legislation. I have only twice been interested in private bills in the English Parliament. On each occasion my interest arose from the sufferings of cattle. One was Captain Campbell’s Bill, the other a measure introduced by the parliamentary representatives of the Pharmaceutical Society. This aimed at preventing the sale of arsenical sheep-dips by unqualified persons. A packet of arsenical sheep-dip could be sold by any grocer or sweet-shop keeper. It contained enough arsenic to kill at least five thousand people. It cost a few pence. I had had a dog and cows poisoned at the Pent. They had drunk out of a rainwater butt in which the tenant farmer had mixed sheep-dip. The sight and still more the sound of those cattle dying in agony was so horrible that I swore I would leave no stone unturned in the effort to prevent the sale of the poison not only by, but to, uninstructed persons. The Bill of the Pharmaceutical Society confining the sale to chemists was thrown out by the opposition of three interests in the House of Commons. The sheep-dip manufacturers opposed it because it might limit the sale of sheep-dip; the Doctors’ representatives opposed it because they wanted the support of the railway interests for a Bill for limiting the number of medical practitioners; the railways interests opposed it because they always acted in concert with the chemical manufacturers and finally the almost all-powerful Licensed Victuallers’ interests opposed it because they wanted the support of the railways, medical and chemical interests in opposition to a measure of local option that the Government was proposing to introduce. So that Bill was thrown out and cattle went on being poisoned by careless farmers.
I do not know exactly what political pull the humanitarian societies of Great Britain may have in Parliament. It must be fairly strong. Otherwise Masterman would not have withdrawn his promise of Government support for Captain Campbell’s measure. Almost miraculously the representatives of the butchers, stock-breeders and graziers who stand next to the publicans in political pull – those bucolic representatives who might be expected to do the stupid and cruel thing in such a situation – signified that they did not intend to oppose the Bill. That was because Campbell had made the singular discovery that the flesh of an animal slaughtered humanely is in better condition and in consequence more valuable than the flesh of one that has been tortured before its death. With his thermometer he had been able to prove to the porkbutchers of the Ardennes and the calf-slaughterers of Flanders that the temperature of an animal that is tortured before death rises to such an extent that the animal is in a fever. The flesh of enfevered animals is less firm and less easy to preserve than that of animals dying with normal temperatures. It is also relatively less fit for human consumption. The method of slaughter of calves in Belgium was as follows before Captain Campbell’s pilgrimage through the Low Countries. The slaughterer would hang from sixty to a hundred calves up by one of their hind legs to a bar. He would then walk in a leisurely way down the line, cutting the tortured animals’ throats and pausing to re-light his pipe between each second or third calf. The pipe was supposed to be a preventative of the homicidal mania from which most slaughterers suffer before their own ends. Captain Campbell proved – I have seen him do it – that the temperature of the calf at the end of the line was frequently as high as 113° Fahrenheit before the butcher even reached it whilst the lowest temperature of any of the animals was never less than 106°. On the other hand the temperature of a calf or other animal conducted without incidental brutality to a scientific slaughter house, prevented from coming in contact with the smell of the blood of its fellows and stunned suddenly before being bled to death – the temperature of such an animal is seldom more than a degree or so above normal. Its flesh also is firmer and, in the case of calves or swine, whiter. Campbell proved to the Flemings and Walloons that the flesh of humanely slaughtered animals fetched from a halfpenny to twopence halfpenny more than that of animals tortured before death.
There was a further aspect of the matter that used to drive me half mad when I thought of it in relation to England. In that country the great majority of slaughter houses had no supervision of any sort. In one village in which I was interested the village butcher’s shop abutted on the village infant school. Beasts were slaughtered by the butcher in his yard beneath the eyes of the school children who sat on the wall above. My attention was called to this – and to the whole horrible matter – by hearing a number of little girls crying in the playground when I passed. They were crying because they were too little to climb up the wall.
And there was no getting that changed. The school marm was too old and feeble to stop the children doing it. The school council were all farmers who thought, like Homais, that it did children good to be acquainted early in life with les émotions fortes. One farmer told me that he had seen every beast his father had sold slaughtered from the time he was eight till he had a farm of his own. And, he said, it had done him no harm. I could not allege that it had. He was quite a good man, as men go, in his human relationships. But that children who in after life will normally have at their mercy generation on generation of dumb beasts bred for human food – that such children should from at early age be taught to find enjoyment in the sight of animal suffering … that seems to me a terrible thought.
Mr Galsworthy’s friends took the view that to prove to farmers and butchers that it paid to be humane was not the right way to go to work in securing humaneness. They said that that end must be arrived at educatively. The moral sense of butchers must be worked on so that freely and without constraint they had mercy on their victims.
I do not know how far Mr Galsworthy endorsed these views. I was put into such a state by the part of his letter that stated that the Societies would not back the Bill that I did not read – or have forgotten – the rest of it. The Bill had to be dropped. There was no chance of its passing without Government support. I argued for a whole weekend with Masterman, begging him to change his mind. But it was at a time when the Government was in difficulties with its land policy. Mr Lloyd George had just made his unfortunate speech about the starving farmer, ruined because the wicked landlord’s pheasants had eaten his mangold wurzels – a plant which, as I have said, the pheasant eschews. That speech made Masterman himself lose his seat for a rural constituency. He was at the time Mr George’s right-hand man and the High Street of the town which he sought to represent was entirely draped with mangold wurzels. It was, I think, Ipswich.
So the Government did not want to be burdened with another topic which in the end mainly affected the agricultural community.
I passed a time of really considerable mental agony. At last I wrote to Mr Galsworthy and said that I could never see him again. And I never have, though he wrote to me a kindly letter when I was in the Red Cross Hospital No. 11 in Rouen in 1916.
I had another curious difference with Mr Galsworthy about animals. At a time when he had just published one of his books against English County Society I met the editor of an organ that represented that class of English individual. He said that he was just going to review Mr Galsworthy’s book and was going to abuse it at the top of his lungs. I said that was rather a shame and, in the end, got him to let me review the book for him. I wrote quite a nice review, alluding to the charm of the style and sentiments and the amount of knowledge that Mr Galsworthy had gained from the study of Turgenev. Then, as a sop to the poor editor, I put in a mild protest. Mr Galsworthy had spiritedly described a battue at a covertside. Hundreds of beasts had been shot. At the end of the chapter he made a poor little wounded rabbit, when all the shooters and beaters had gone, creep out into the twilight open to die. I pointed out that wounded rabbits never came into the open to die but died in their buries. Mr Galsworthy wrote to say: How silly of him. Of course he knew that rabbits died in their buries. Another correspondent of the paper wrote furiously to say that wherever rabbits died they never did in their buries. A dying rabbit was always turned out by its comrades in a natural fear of death or of the infection of a corpse’s decay. I duly made the note: How silly it was of me not to have thought of that. Other correspondents again wrote in to say that that was quite a mistake. In digging out wounded rabbits or ferrets they had frequently come on the skeletons or decaying corpses of other rabbits. Altogether the editor came in for a great deal of free copy and was very pleased.
I suppose the truth about the deaths of rabbits varies. I never myself dug out a dead rabbit though I have opened a good many buries. And actually the dying rabbit, like most other dying beasts, seeks to die in the shade of a bush and in woodlands. But I suppose that if a rabbit is wounded and is a big, heavy animal that its comrades cannot eject, supposing it to have the strength to reach its hole it will die there and the others will not be able to turn it out. In captivity a doe will usually eject its sick young from breeding boxes. Indeed most gregarious quadrupeds or birds will get rid of a sick comrade if they can. I remember at the Pent Conrad’s mare, Nancy – or it may have been an animal of my own – slipped into a brook and lay, belly upwards, kicking frantically. All the other horses in the field at once attacked it showing every sign of indignation and terror, and as it was firmly wedged between the narrow brook banks we had the utmost difficulty in driving them off and getting it out. As soon as it was again on its feet the others ran up and smelt it and gave the usual signs of affection.
In any case I wish I could have again breakfasts like those Mr Galsworthy used to give me – and not for the kippers, kidneys, sausages, soles and silver-ware alone! For it was rare in London then to find that décor and at the same time a love for Turgenev… It is perhaps rarer nowadays to find either! … I differed violently from my host as to the purposes and, if not quite so violently, as to the methods of the art that he was later to dominate in several Continents. But one’s differences in those days were merely the expression of enthusiasms. They come back to me as passing in the sunlight.
The shadow used to fall on me as soon as I left the Mews. Going back to my own house was like returning to a prison of illnesses and mental strains almost too heavy to be borne. And the pavement along the blank wall that supported the reservoir of the waterworks would be littered with hairpins. You can have no idea how that circumstance added to my depression.
Some time before I had come upon Zola seated on a public bench in Hyde Park. He had been gazing gloomily at the ground and poking the sand with the end of his cane. It had been at the time of his exile during the Dreyfus case and no gloom could have ever been greater than his. He said wearily: ‘What was one to think of a country where nursemaids dressed their hair so carelessly that he had found as many as eighteen hairpins on one morning in front of one park bench? A city so improvident must be doomed.’
The memory of Zola so depressed me that merely to be reminded of him by those hairpins was saddening. He had, at any rate during that stay in London, many phobias. I remember riding with him in a hansom cab, conducting him somewhere at the request of someone who had undertaken to look after him but was prevented. I think it must have been Mr R. H. Sherard, whom I knew slightly at the time. I did not much want to ride with Zola. I suppose I was the only Englishman who differed from him as to the Dreyfus case, yet he was so deeply miserable that it would have been unthinkable to argue with him. Nevertheless I felt the matter very deeply. He said very little, taking it for granted that I knew no French. But eventually I found that he was counting the numbers on the registration plates of the cabs that were in front of us If the added digits came to nine – or possibly to seven – he was momentarily elated; if they came to some inauspicious number – to thirteen I suppose – he would be prolongedly depressed. I supposed him to be thinking of the Affaire and was not rendered any more gay.
He was very carefully looked after by various littérateurs whilst he was in London so he can hardly have had call to depreciate the spirit of hospitality he found there Its manner I believe was less to his taste. He had a singular misadventure in a house a few yards from the one I then inhabited on Campden Hill. He was in some club and the editor of a famous political journal of the Right said to him: ‘Ha, Zola, all this visiting of clubs gives you very little idea of England. What you want is a taste of English home life.’ So he invited the unfortunate Frenchman to take pot-luck with him one evening and share a boiled leg of mutton and caper sauce. To reach Campden Hill is a confusing affair for foreigners in London. Zola set out about a quarter past seven and towards eight found himself in Camden Town, a poor quarter, nine miles or so from the lordly Hill – as if one should seek in Clichy or the Battery a house actually situate in Passy or Park Avenue. He reached Campden Hill about ten-thirty. The house to which he was invited was in darkness and he spent more time in the shrubbery in the front garden. When he reached the front door he found it open and myopically entered the dark hall. He was normally very short-sighted and at the time was suffering from something like conjunctivitis so that he had to wear black spectacles. Suddenly he was confronted by a lady in a yellow flannel bed-wrap, with her hair in curl-papers. She was on the landing above him and held over her head a flat candlestick. She called: ‘William! When are you coming to bed?’
Zola, who had lost himself in the dark hall, tried in confusion to escape from that apparition. He fell over a prostrate body. It was that of the editor. The editor had been consoling himself for the absence of his famous guest. He had gone down to the cellar to fetch another bottle and, reascending, had fallen over the top step of the kitchen stairs – in front of the garden door which was open. Zola therefore pitched down the garden steps. He had had more than enough of English family life.
I had had myself before my tenancy of the murderous house was up. But I had it from another angle. I have said that there is no department of human labour that I should be afraid or ashamed of tackling. That house made me prove it, on the domestic side of life’s activities. It was one of those years when influenza – it was then called the Russian influenza – struck London as if with an immense hailstorm. That house, as if because it stood on a hill-top looking over a great part of the city, it struck as if with iron bullets. Member after member of my family went down, then the children’s governess, then one by one the servants except the cook, then the temporary servants and charwomen. No one was left on their feet except the hospital nurse I got in – she was an added flail! – the cook and myself. The cook, the nurse and I, ran the family meals. There was fortunately a sort of dumbwaiter hoisted by ropes that ran up several stories of the house. It made a rumbling like intoxicated thunder but would carry several trays of food at a time. Conrad came in to lunch every day because he was trying to work very hard in his lodgings round the corner. He could not eat English food cooked as he there found it. On the other hand he revelled in Johanna’s cooking.
Johanna was an extraordinary personage from the hinterland of Hamburg. She exactly resembled Thackeray’s caricatures of German peasants in the Kickelburys on the Rhine. If you had taken five balls of putty, rolled round in your hands as you used to do at school and had stuck them together to represent trunk, arms and legs, and if you had taken a penny bun, stuck in two currants to represent eyes and painted the cheeks vermilion and varnished them, and if you had gummed a handful of unarranged straws on the back of the bun – then you would have had Johanna. I know several German platts but she spoke in a series of loud, cheerful and animated grunts of which I never understood a syllable.
So Johanna cooked, and, in the bowels of the earth, I washed up the plates and dishes when there was no charwoman. And we hauled that dumbwaiter up on its loud ropes like gnomes making thunder and hauled it down again with even greater labour until it reached the first floor. Then it would decide to crash down with a sound greater than that of the artillery during the first battle of the Somme. I would go up and lay the table in the dining-room and Johanna would cook for Conrad and me as we sat in state and discussed nice shades in sauce flavours. I do not think that Conrad ever noticed that anything was amiss – or at least unusual. He was much worried over Nostromo.
Then one day no voice from the kitchen answered mine in the speaking-tube. Johanna was lying face-downwards on the kitchen table with her varnished scarlet cheeks in a great sieve of flour. She had been cooking against influenza for a fortnight. We used to have in those pre-telephone days a contraption with which, by spinning an arrow round a dial, you could call firemen, or cabs, or a doctor or ambulance. I spun it round and an ambulance turned up. The bearers said as they carried Johanna off that there were many houses like mine in London then. I could hardly believe it. London presented its usual grey and stolidly sane aspect.
I took up the cooking too then and Conrad noticed no difference as long as I imitated Johanna. But once I cooked a civet de lièvre à la Parisienne. That is not jugged hare as you have it in Anglo-Saxondom but has a sauce that is almost jet black with richness. Conrad inspected it as he always did, carefully and with his monocle screwed into his eye. He rubbed his hands and with enthusiasm unfolded his napkin. When, with head on one side and a look of pleased anticipation, he had tasted it, he started slightly. He said:
‘My dear faller… The admirable Johanna has of course surpassed herself… But … eh … my gout! … Une telle succulence, mon cher … Tebb says the greatest abstinence…’ He added that … if there remained a little of the admirable saddle of lamb of the night before … a small slice, cold, with a leaf of salad …
I went down wearily into the kitchen, put the remains of lamb on the dumbwaiter, washed a lettuce and beat up some dressing… I imitated Johanna from then on.
I was in addition doing double tides of writing. I had decided that I must do something of my own – I forget what it was – in order to defray the extra costs of that barrack. And Conrad had to be constantly bolstered up, to dictate, to have passages written in to, Nostromo. It was at that time that I wrote the pages of Nostromo that Mr Keating possesses. I also had the influenza.