"I am still far from well, but am much better. My illness was caused by
too much dissipation, which I plunged into for relaxation. For some
weeks previously I had got a particularly large dose of my environment.
Terry and I live in surroundings which would kill an ordinary person.
Our little home is not as bad in the summer time. We can have the
windows and doors open, but now in this cold winter we must all live in
one room, a very small room, where there is a stove. The dampness
penetrates right through the walls and the wind comes through the holes
in the window panes. Sundays are the hardest days for me. Then Kate,
queen of the kitchen, is here, and she delights in cooking all sorts of
things on that day, so for the remaining six days our home smells of her
culinary operations--most abominable, this odour of stale cookery! And
what a mess our rooms are in on Monday morning! You wouldn't
comprehend, even if I told you. I have to clean up all this, and I wish
I could fly away every Sunday. At times I get so tired of this way of
living. I hope some day I may find a large barn with a hay loft: I would
immediately abolish Kate and her cookery and would be comfortable for
once in my life.
"So I ran away, for a time, partly for relief, partly because I was
rather taken with a Detroit anarchist who was visiting us. Though he was
a comrade, he was really a Philistine, which I did not see till
afterwards. I saw only that he was young and lusty and wanted a lark, as
I did, so I went with him on an awful tear, and returned terribly done
up, as you know.
"I have been lying here in this little room for three weeks. I thought
surely I should die, and I was neither glad nor sorry. It was curious,
this sensation of approaching death. All these days Terry sat opposite
me at a table reading or writing. I could see him distinctly at times,
at other times everything was misty or completely dark, only his voice
reached me from such a long, long distance. He sat there like an
implacable fate, with calm, cold eyes, gazing above and beyond me.
Between two slow heart beats I felt it was almost a duty to call him
and bid him farewell, but some strange sense of shyness held me back. I
tried so hard to think of what I might do, and the most grotesque and
comical things suggested themselves. At one lucid moment I had the
brilliant idea of becoming a jockey!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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