Chapter III: Cromer Begins to Make Mistakes (3)

“_17th Dec._—I have been a week in bed with a strong fever, a soul- crushing evil, and now feel twenty years older than when I left England hardly a month ago. The things of this life seem very far away, or seemed so till this morning, not merely the things of youth, love, ambition, vanity, but equally so the things of the spirit, all hope, all fear, all wish to live or die. In these depths, the problem of a future life seems foolishness; God, heaven and hell, good and evil, duty of any kind, responsibility, words without meaning. Above all the heart is dead. Who is there that can help or heal? The good to us are as one with the wicked. There is no voice in all the world that can reach us or console. Only with the dead, those who have passed through the shadow where we stand, are we able to converse as equal to ourselves in sorrow. I seemed to grope in blind impotent search for a dead hand, Cowie’s, as she used to be here sixteen years ago, when we lived like mendicants in the little garden house, and as she had nursed me in Ceylon. Then I could have howled like a wild beast in my desolation. Such were the last few days.

“Now I am better, the fever almost gone.”

This was the beginning of a long illness which eventually declared itself as Mediterranean fever, and from which for two years it seemed unlikely I should recover.

It is with reluctance that I waste space in recording these ups and downs of health which would be better passed over in entire silence, for I am sufficiently old-fashioned to be of the opinion of our forefathers, that bodily infirmities should be hidden as far as possible from public view, and that self-respect should require us as men to follow the dignified course of the wild creatures of the forest, who retire out of sight when suffering, and end by dying of old age in some remote retreat alone. It is, however, not possible for me, in the present volume, to avoid all reference to those evil hours, seeing that they have covered so large a section of my later years. It has been fortunate for me that, however often pain has incapacitated me physically during the last decade of my life, it has always left my mind its full vigour, and allowed me to continue, with rare interruptions, its long acquired habit of setting down my daily record in these diaries. So far, indeed, has this been the case that during the years 1904 and 1905 I actually got through more literary work than in any other half dozen years of middle life. The necessity of bodily inaction forced me into activities of another sort which, in their turn, enabled me to survive. For this I thank a kindly Providence and the persistent devotion of not a few untiring friends who encouraged me to work, and working to live on.