The Assassin's Cloak. Группа авторов
16 February
1798
Went for eggs into the Coombe, and to the bakers; a hail shower; brought home large burthens of sticks, a starlight evening, the sky closed in, and the ground white with snow before we went to bed.
Dorothy Wordsworth
1912
12.5m. Lunch Temp. +6.1º; Supper Temp. +7º. A rather trying position. Evans has nearly broken down in the brain, we think. He is absolutely changed from his normal self-reliant self. This morning and this afternoon he stopped the march on some trivial excuse. We are on short rations, but not very short, food spins out till tomorrow night. We cannot be more than 10 or 12 miles from the depôt, but the weather is all against us. After lunch we were enveloped in a snow sheet, land just looming. Memory should hold the events of a very troublesome march with more troubles ahead. Perhaps all will be well if we can get to our depôt tomorrow fairly early, but it is anxious work with the sick man. But it’s no use meeting troubles halfway, and our sleep is all too short to write more.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott
1932 [after the death of her partner, Lytton Strachey]
At last I am alone. At last there is nothing between us. I have been reading my letters to you in the library this evening. You are so engraved on my brain that I think of nothing else. Everything I look at is part of you. And there seems no point in life now you are gone. I used to say: ‘I must eat my meals properly as Lytton wouldn’t like me to behave badly when he was away.’ But now there is no coming back. No point in ‘improvements’. Nobody to write letters to. Only the interminable long days which never seem to end and the nights which end all too soon and turn to dawns. All gaiety has gone out of my life and I feel old and melancholy. All I can do is to plant snow drops and daffodils in my graveyard! Now there is nothing left. All your papers have been taken away. Your clothes have gone. Your room is bare. In a few months no traces will be left. Just a few book plates in some books and never again, however long I look out of the window, will I see your tall thin figure walking across the path past the dwarf pine past the stumps, and then climb the haha and come across the lawn. Our jokes have gone for ever. There is nobody now to make ‘disçerattas’ with, to laugh over our particular words. To discuss the difficulties of love, to read Ibsen in the evening. And to play cards when we were too ‘dim’ for reading. These mouring sentinels that we arranged so carefully. The shiftings to get the new rose Corneille in the best position. They will go, and the beauty of our library ‘will be over’. – I feel as if I was in a dream, almost unconscious, so much of me was in you.
* * *
And I thought as I threw the rubbish on the bonfire. ‘So that’s the end of his spectacles. Those spectacles that have been his companions all these years. Burnt in a heap of leaves.’ And those vests the ‘bodily companions’ of his days now are worn by a carter in the fields. In a few years what will be left of him? A few books on some shelves, but the intimate things that I loved, all gone.
And soon even the people who knew his pale thin hands and the texture of his thick shiny hair, and grisly beard, they will be dead and all remembrance of him will vanish. I watched the gap close over others but for Lytton one couldn’t have believed (because one did not believe it was ever possible) that the world would go on the same. [She shot herself on 11 March.]
Dora Carrington
1947 [staying in College accommodation while on a lecture tour]
Upon waking, I wonder just why I’m staying here in this sanatorium. The room is white and fluffy, like the one at Vassar. With nurselike attention, a woman has placed a breakfast platter beside me. Last evening, to spare me any fatigue, they brought my dinner to my room. Without leaving my bed, I drink the orange juice, eat the crusty rolls, and savor the charms of convalescence in the café au lait. Nothing is stranger to me than these restrained pleasures. Amid such attentive care I feel so fragile and precious I almost frighten myself. Perhaps I’ve undertaken a detox cure; no alcohol, no noise, no movies, no music, no fever. I draw an armchair up to the table. I’ve stayed here today to write an article before hurrying back to New York and going north. But I like to nurse the illusion that I’m restrained by force and working to distract myself. There’s nothing more restful on a trip than to imagine you’re in prison.
Simone de Beauvoir
17 February
1763
I dined at the Chaplain’s table upon a roasted Tongue and Udder. N.B. I shall not dine on a roasted Tongue and Udder again very soon.
Rev. James Woodforde
1888
Today a dinner was given in Rodin’s honour by his friends and admirers, a dinner at which I presided, with a draught in my back.
I found myself sitting next to Clemenceau with his round Kalmuck head, and he told me some anecdotes about the peasants in his province and how they would stop him out in the open during his tours of the department to consult him about their illnesses. He described one huge woman who, just as the horses of his brake were about to gallop away from some place or other, leaned on their cruppers and called out: ‘Oh, Monsieur, I suffer from wind something awful!’ To which the Radical deputy, giving his horses a crack of the whip which sent them on their way, replied:‘Then fart, my good woman, fart!’
The Brothers Goncourt
1912
A very terrible day. Evans looked a little better after a good sleep, and declared, as he always did, that he was quite well. He started in his place on the traces, but half an hour later worked his ski shoes adrift, and had to leave the sledge. The surface was awful, the soft recently fallen snow clogging the ski and runners at every step, the sledge groaning, the sky overcast, and the land hazy. We stopped after about one hour, and Evans came up again, but very slowly. Half an hour later he dropped out again on the same plea. He asked Bowers to lend him a piece of string. I cautioned him to come on as quickly as he could and he answered cheerfully as I thought. We had to push on, and the remainder of us were forced to pull very hard, sweating heavily. Abreast the Monument Rock we stopped, and seeing Evans a long way astern, I camped for lunch. There was no alarm at first, and we prepared tea and our own meal, consuming the latter. After lunch, and Evans still not appearing, we looked out, to see him still afar off. By this time we were alarmed, and all four started back on ski. I was first to reach the poor man and shocked at his appearance; he was on his knees with clothing disarranged, hands uncovered and frost-bitten, and a wild look in his eyes. Asked what was the matter, he replied with a slow speech that he didn’t know, but thought he must have fainted. We got him on his feet, but after two or three steps he sank down again. He showed every sign of complete collapse. Wilson, Bowers, and I went back for the sledge, whilst Oates remained with him. When we returned he was practically unconscious, and when we got him into the tent quite comatose. He died quietly at 12.30 a.m. On discussing the symptoms we think he began to get weaker just before we reached the Pole, and that his downward path was accelerated first by the shock of his frost-bitten fingers, and later by falls during rough travelling on the glacier, further by his loss of all confidence in himself. Wilson thinks it certain he must have injured his brain by a fall. It is a terrible thing to lose a companion in this way, but calm reflection shows that there could not have been a better ending to the terrible anxieties of the past week. Discussion of the situation at lunch yesterday shows us what a desperate pass we were in with a sick man on our hands so far from home.
At 1 a.m. we packed up and came down over the pressure ridges, finding our depôt easily.
Captain Robert Falcon Scott
1931
Finished reading The Intimate Journals of Paul Gauguin. Very fresh mind – he at once joins the company of those whom we wish we could have met. Such a distinctive French book makes a Scot feel that he is rather a dog-collared dog. We cannot recall Mary Stuart without seeing the shadow of Knox at her back.