A few weeks later I landed in England, I, who no longer desired to set
foot on any land again.
At nine-and-twenty I was gaunt and gray; my nerves were shattered, my
heart was broken; and my face showed it without let or hindrance from
the spirit that was broken too. Pride, will, courage, and endurance, all
these had expired in my long and lonely battle with the sea. They had
kept me alive-for this. And now they left me naked to mine enemies.
For every hand seemed raised against me, though in reality it was the
hand of fellowship that the world stretched out, and the other was the
reading of a jaundiced eye. I could not help it: there was a poison in
my veins that made me all ingratitude and perversity. The world welcomed
me back, and I returned the compliment by sulking like the recaptured
runaway I was at heart. The world showed a sudden interest in me; so I
took no further interest in the world, but, on the contrary, resented
its attentions with unreasonable warmth and obduracy; and my would-be
friends I regarded as my very worst enemies. The majority, I feel sure,
meant but well and kindly by the poor survivor. But the survivor could
not forget that his name was still in the newspapers, nor blink the fact
that he was an unworthy hero of the passing hour. And he suffered
enough from brazenly meddlesome and self-seeking folk, from impudent and
inquisitive intruders, to justify some suspicion of old acquaintances
suddenly styling themselves old friends, and of distant connections
newly and unduly eager to claim relationship. Many I misjudged, and have
long known it. On the whole, however, I wonder at that attitude of mine
as little as I approve of it.
If I had distinguished myself in any other way, it would have been a
different thing. It was the fussy, sentimental, inconsiderate
interest in one thrown into purely accidental and necessarily painful
prominence--the vulgarization of an unspeakable tragedy--that my soul
abhorred. I confess that I regarded it from my own unique and selfish
point of view. What was a thrilling matter to the world was a torturing
memory to me. The quintessence of the torture was, moreover, my own
secret. It was not the loss of the _Lady Jermyn_ that I could not bear to
speak about; it was my own loss; but the one involved the other. My
loss apart, however, it was plain enough to dwell upon experiences so
terrible and yet so recent as those which I had lived to tell. I did
what I considered my duty to the public, but I certainly did no more. My
reticence was rebuked in the papers that made the most of me, but would
fain have made more. And yet I do not think that I was anything but
docile with those who had a manifest right to question me; to the
owners, and to other interested persons, with whom I was confronted on
one pretext or another, I told my tale as fully and as freely as I have
told it here, though each telling hurt more than the last. That was
necessary and unavoidable; it was the private intrusions which I
resented with all the spleen the sea had left me in exchange for the
qualities it had taken away.
Relatives I had as few as misanthropist could desire; but from
self-congratulation on the fact, on first landing, I soon came to keen
regret. They at least would have sheltered me from spies and busybodies;
they at least would have secured the peace and privacy of one who was
no hero in fact or spirit, whose noblest deed was a piece of self
preservation which he wished undone with all his heart.
Self-consciousness no doubt multiplied my flattering assailants. I
have said that my nerves were shattered. I may have imagined much and
exaggerated the rest. Yet what truth there was in my suspicions you
shall duly see. I felt sure that I was followed in the street, and my
every movement dogged by those to whom I would not condescend to turn
and look. Meanwhile, I had not the courage to go near my club, and
the Temple was a place where I was accosted in every court, effusively
congratulated on the marvellous preservation of my stale spoilt life,
and invited right and left to spin my yarn over a quiet pipe! Well,
perhaps such invitations were not so common as they have grown in my
memory; nor must you confuse my then feelings on all these matters with
those which I entertain as I write. I have grown older, and, I hope,
something kindlier and wiser since then. Yet to this day I cannot blame
myself for abandoning my chambers and avoiding my club.
For a temporary asylum I pitched upon a small, quiet, empty, private
hotel which I knew of in Charterhouse Square. Instantly the room next
mine became occupied.
All the first night I imagined I heard voices talking about me in that
room next door. It was becoming a disease with me. Either I was being
dogged, watched, followed, day and night, indoors and out, or I was the
victim of a very ominous hallucination. That night I never closed an eye
nor lowered my light. In the morning I took a four-wheel cab and
drove straight to Harley Street; and, upon my soul, as I stood on the
specialist's door-step, I could have sworn I saw the occupant of the
room next mine dash by me in a hansom!
“Ah!” said the specialist; “so you cannot sleep; you hear voices;
you fancy you are being followed in the street. You don't think these
fancies spring entirely from the imagination? Not entirely--just so. And
you keep looking behind you, as though somebody were at your elbow; and
you prefer to sit with your back close to the wall. Just so--just so.
Distressing symptoms, to be sure, but--but hardly to be wondered at in a
man who has come through your nervous strain.” A keen professional light
glittered in his eyes. “And almost commonplace,” he added, smiling,
“compared with the hallucinations you must have suffered from on that
hen-coop! Ah, my dear sir, the psychological interest of your case is
very great!”
“It may be,” said I, brusquely. “But I come to you to get that hen-coop
out of my head, not to be reminded of it. Everybody asks me about the
damned thing, and you follow everybody else. I wish it and I were at the
bottom of the sea together!”
This speech had the effect of really interesting the doctor in my
present condition, which was indeed one of chronic irritation and
extreme excitability, alternating with fits of the very blackest
despair. Instead of offending my gentleman I had put him on his mettle,
and for half an hour he honored me with the most exhaustive inquisition
ever elicited from a medical man. His panacea was somewhat in the nature
of an anti-climax, but at least it had the merits of simplicity and
of common sense. A change of air--perfect quiet--say a cottage in the
country--not too near the sea. And he shook my hand kindly when I left.
“Keep up your heart, my dear sir,” said he. “Keep up your courage and
your heart.”
“My heart!” I cried. “It's at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”
He was the first to whom I had said as much. He was a stranger. What did
it matter? And, oh, it was so true--so true.
Every day and all day I was thinking of my love; every hour and all
hours she was before me with her sunny hair and young, young face. Her
wistful eyes were gazing into mine continually. Their wistfulness I
had never realized at the time; but now I did; and I saw it for what it
seemed always to have been, the soft, sad, yearning look of one fated
to die young. So young--so young! And I might live to be an old man,
mourning her.
That I should never love again I knew full well. This time there was no
mistake. I have implied, I believe, that it was for another woman I fled
originally to the diggings. Well, that one was still unmarried, and when
the papers were full of me she wrote me a letter which I now believe to
have been merely kind. At the time I was all uncharitableness; but words
of mine would fail to tell you how cold this letter left me; it was as a
candle lighted in the full blaze of the sun.
With all my bitterness, however, you must not suppose that I had quite
lost the feelings which had inspired me at sunset on the lonely ocean,
while my mind still held good. I had been too near my Maker ever to lose
those feelings altogether. They were with me in the better moments of
these my worst days. I trusted His wisdom still. There was a reason for
everything; there were reasons for all this. I alone had been saved out
of all those souls who sailed from Melbourne in the _Lady Jermyn_. Why
should I have been the favored one; I with my broken heart and now
lonely life? Some great inscrutable reason there must be; at my worst
I did not deny that. But neither did I puzzle my sick brain with the
reason. I just waited for it to be revealed to me, if it were God's will
ever to reveal it. And that I conceive to be the one spirit in which a
man may contemplate, with equal sanity and reverence, the mysteries and
the miseries of his life.