No, I can look for no help from any human being. If I consult any
more, they may put their heads together and I may find myself in an
asylum. I can but grip my courage with both hands, and pray that an
honest man may not be abandoned.
April 10. It is the sweetest spring within the memory of man. So
green, so mild, so beautiful! Ah, what a contrast between nature
without and my own soul so torn with doubt and terror! It has been an
uneventful day, but I know that I am on the edge of an abyss. I know
it, and yet I go on with the routine of my life. The one bright spot
is that Agatha is happy and well and out of all danger. If this
creature had a hand on each of us, what might she not do?
April 16. The woman is ingenious in her torments. She knows how fond
I am of my work, and how highly my lectures are thought of. So it is
from that point that she now attacks me. It will end, I can see, in my
losing my professorship, but I will fight to the finish. She shall not
drive me out of it without a struggle.
I was not conscious of any change during my lecture this morning save
that for a minute or two I had a dizziness and swimminess which rapidly
passed away. On the contrary, I congratulated myself upon having made
my subject (the functions of the red corpuscles) both interesting and
clear. I was surprised, therefore, when a student came into my
laboratory immediately after the lecture, and complained of being
puzzled by the discrepancy between my statements and those in the text
books. He showed me his note-book, in which I was reported as having
in one portion of the lecture championed the most outrageous and
unscientific heresies. Of course I denied it, and declared that he had
misunderstood me, but on comparing his notes with those of his
companions, it became clear that he was right, and that I really had
made some most preposterous statements. Of course I shall explain it
away as being the result of a moment of aberration, but I feel only too
sure that it will be the first of a series. It is but a month now to
the end of the session, and I pray that I may be able to hold out until
then.
April 26. Ten days have elapsed since I have had the heart to make any
entry in my journal. Why should I record my own humiliation and
degradation? I had vowed never to open it again. And yet the force of
habit is strong, and here I find myself taking up once more the record
of my own dreadful experiences--in much the same spirit in which a
suicide has been known to take notes of the effects of the poison which
killed him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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