The Herald upset him terribly. Its bland assumption that Russians and
Sein Feiners could do no wrong, but that the slightest sign of
assertion of authority on the part of any government was "wicked
tyranny," shocked his very soul. I remember that he wrote a long, most
earnest letter to Lansbury, pointing out to him that if he subverted
all authority and constitutional government his own party would in its
turn be subverted when it came to govern. Of course, he received no
answer.
During these months I came to love the man. The attraction that I had
felt for him from the very first deeply underlay all my relation to
him, but as I saw more of him I found many very positive reasons for my
liking. He was the simplest, bravest, purest, most loyal, and most
unselfish soul alive. He seemed to me to have no faults at all unless
it were a certain softness towards the wishes of those whom he loved.
He could not bear to hurt anybody, but he never hesitated if some
principle in which he believed was called in question.
He had not, of course, a subtle mind--he was no analyst of
character--but that did not make him uninteresting. I never heard any
one call him dull company, although men laughed at him for his good
nature and unselfishness and traded on him all the time. He was the
best human being I have ever known or am ever likely to know.
Well, the crisis arrived with astonishing suddenness. About the second
or third of August I went down to stay with some friends at the little
fishing village of Rafiel in Glebeshire.
I saw him just before I left London, and he told me that he was going
to stay in London for the first half of August, that he liked London in
August, even though his club would be closed and Horton's delivered
over to the painters.
I heard nothing about him for a fortnight, and then I received a most
extraordinary letter from Box Hamilton, a fellow clubman of mine and
Wilbraham's. Had I heard, he said, that poor old Wilbraham had gone
right off his "knocker"? Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but
suddenly one day at lunch time Wilbraham had turned up at Grey's (the
club to which our own club was a visitor during its cleaning), had
harangued every one about religion in the most extraordinary way, had
burst out from there and started shouting in Piccadilly, had, after
collecting a crowd, disappeared and not been seen until the next
morning, when he had been found, nearly killed, after a hand-to-hand
fight with the market men in Covent Garden.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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