A Writer's Notebook (4 page)

How happy life would be if an undertaking retained to the end the delight of its beginning, if the dregs of a cup of wine were as sweet as the first sip.

However much you may dislike a relation, and whatever ill you may yourself say of him, you do not like others to say anything which shows him in a ridiculous or objectionable light; since the discredit thrown on your relation reflects upon yourself and wounds your vanity.

At the hospital. Two men were great friends; they lunched together, worked together and played together: they were inseparable. One of them went home for a few days, and in his
absence the other got blood-poisoning at a post-mortem and forty-eight hours later died. The first came back; he'd made an appointment to meet his friend in the P.M. room; when he went in he found him lying on a slab naked and dead.

“It gave me quite a turn,” he said when he told me.

I had just come from London. I went into the dining-room and there I saw my old aunt sitting at her table and at work. The lamp was lit. I went up to her and touched her on the shoulder; she gave a little cry and then, seeing it was I, sprang up and put her thin arms round my neck and kissed me.

“Ah, darling boy,” she said, “I thought I should never see you again.” Then, with a sigh, she leaned her poor old head on my breast: “I feel so sad, Willie; I know that I am passing away; I shall never see the winter out. I had wished that your dear uncle might go first, so that he might be spared the grief of my death.”

The tears came into my eyes and began to run down my cheeks. Then I knew that I had been dreaming, for I remembered that my aunt had been dead nearly two years, and that, almost before she had slept out the beauty-sleep of death, my uncle had married again.

Last year there was a bad storm in St. Ives' Bay and an Italian ship was caught in it. The ship was going down; a rocket was sent, but the sailors didn't seem to know how to use the apparatus; they were in sight of land, with every possibility of saving themselves, and were helpless. Mrs. Ellis told me that she stayed at her cottage window, looking at the ship as it sank; the agony was so terrible that at last she felt she could bear it no longer and she went into the kitchen and there spent the night praying.

Most people are such fools that it really is no great compliment to say that a man is above the average.

How ugly most people are! It's a pity they don't try to make up for it by being agreeable.

She's unmarried. She told me that in her opinion marriage was bound to be a failure if a woman could only have one husband at a time.

How the gods must have chuckled when they added Hope to the evils with which they filled Pandora's box, for they knew very well that this was the cruellest evil of them all, since it is Hope that lures mankind to endure its misery to the end.

This morning Caserio Santo, the assassin of President Carnot, was executed; the papers are full of phrases such as: Santo died like a coward.

But surely he didn't; it is true that he trembled so that he could scarcely walk to the scaffold, and his last words were spoken in so weak a voice as hardly to be audible, but these words were the assertion of his faith:
Vive l'Anarchie
. He was faithful to his principles to the last; his mind was as free from cowardice and as firm as when he struck the blow which he knew must be expiated by his own death. That he trembled and could scarcely speak are the signs of the physical terror of death, which the bravest may feel, but that he spoke the words he did shows strange courage. The flesh was weak, but the spirit unconquerable.

These last days everyone has been in a singular state of excitement about a possible war between the English and the French.

A week ago nothing was heard of it; no one dreamt of such an event; but last Saturday the papers began to mention that there were strained relations between the two countries. Even then no word of war was spoken, and when it was suggested everyone laughed at the absurdity. On the following day the papers were more explicit; the cause of the trouble was Madagascar, which the French wished to annex. The papers talked of grave complications and began to suggest that it might be necessary to fight; but still among private people it was looked upon as a groundless scare, for they argued that the French would never be so foolish as to provoke a war; and now today, Wednesday, the third of October, the town was startled by an announcement that a Cabinet council had been hastily summoned, the ministers, who were all away, having been suddenly called back to London.