worthy of the name .’ A month later he escaped from the place, but only through a mishap which threatened to fulfil his rhetorical death wish. A lout of a pupil maliciously fouled him when he joined in a football game, inflicting an injury which caused him to pass blood later. After a few days’ recuperation he returned to the classroom but soon collapsed, coughing up more blood. The injury appeared to be a crushed kidney, but the local doctor suspected he might also be consumptive. His mother arranged for him to convalesce at Up Park, where he had another haemorrhage almost as soon as he arrived, seeming to confirm the diagnosis.
His convalescence was not entirely idle. He took the opportunity once more to stock his mind from Up Park’s extensive library, and when he moved on from there and took refuge with another friend from college days who lived in the Staffordshire Potteries, an area improbably reputed to be healthy for consumptives, he made some tentative efforts at literary composition, including the first draft of a tale about travelling in time. But he was steeped in self-pity at the prospect of dying with all his aspirations unfulfilled, and without ever having had carnal knowledge of a woman. He discovered later that because consumption is an almost painless illness it encourages a dangerous passivity in its victims, and realised that he had been half in love with easeful death when in fact he was beginning to recover his physical strength.
The turning point occurred one brilliantly sunny day in the late spring of 1888, when he went for a walk in a small wood on the outskirts of Stoke where the fuming chimneys of the potbanks were invisible and wild hyacinths were blooming in profusion. He passed a pretty girl on the footpath, and raised his hat, meeting her eyes with frank admiration. She smiled shyly and walked on, while he stopped and looked back at her, appreciating the swing of her hips under her skirt. He lay down on a grassy bank among the hyacinths and inhaled their heady perfume. He imagined himself making love to the pretty girl, naked under the trees, like Adam and Eve in their nuptial bower, and then he substituted Isabel for her in his mind’s eye. He said to himself: ‘I have been dying for nearly two-thirds of a year, and I have died enough.’ He returned immediately to London and began to look for a job.
Suddenly he was filled with renewed energy, ambition and confidence. Over the next couple of years he obtained a teaching post at a private school in Kilburn, and then a much better paid position as tutor with a correspondence college that served external students of the University of London, where he made himself invaluable as a designer of teaching materials and editor of the house journal, and taught a course in biology for London-based students. Before long he was earning £300 per year. He became an external student himself, and obtained his B.Sc., taking first-class honours in Zoology, thus wiping out the humiliation of his expulsion from the Normal School of Science. He began to project for himself a career in education, but he had not given up his literary ambitions, and succeeded in placing an essay of scientific speculation called ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, developed from a paper he had given to the College Debating Society, with the prestigious and progressive Fortnightly Review . He sent the letter of acceptance to Simmons with a jubilant note scribbled on the back: ‘ Is this the dove with a sprig of bay? Is it poor Pilgrim’s first glimpse of the white and shining city? Or a mirage? ’ It was not a mirage, but all this effort took its toll on his health and he had two more serious episodes of illness, one with another haemorrhage. On each occasion he went back to work, after short periods of convalescence, with undiminished zeal, driven by the need to save enough money to marry Isabel and at last consummate his love for her.
In spite of that unhappy conversation
His convalescence was not entirely idle. He took the opportunity once more to stock his mind from Up Park’s extensive library, and when he moved on from there and took refuge with another friend from college days who lived in the Staffordshire Potteries, an area improbably reputed to be healthy for consumptives, he made some tentative efforts at literary composition, including the first draft of a tale about travelling in time. But he was steeped in self-pity at the prospect of dying with all his aspirations unfulfilled, and without ever having had carnal knowledge of a woman. He discovered later that because consumption is an almost painless illness it encourages a dangerous passivity in its victims, and realised that he had been half in love with easeful death when in fact he was beginning to recover his physical strength.
The turning point occurred one brilliantly sunny day in the late spring of 1888, when he went for a walk in a small wood on the outskirts of Stoke where the fuming chimneys of the potbanks were invisible and wild hyacinths were blooming in profusion. He passed a pretty girl on the footpath, and raised his hat, meeting her eyes with frank admiration. She smiled shyly and walked on, while he stopped and looked back at her, appreciating the swing of her hips under her skirt. He lay down on a grassy bank among the hyacinths and inhaled their heady perfume. He imagined himself making love to the pretty girl, naked under the trees, like Adam and Eve in their nuptial bower, and then he substituted Isabel for her in his mind’s eye. He said to himself: ‘I have been dying for nearly two-thirds of a year, and I have died enough.’ He returned immediately to London and began to look for a job.
Suddenly he was filled with renewed energy, ambition and confidence. Over the next couple of years he obtained a teaching post at a private school in Kilburn, and then a much better paid position as tutor with a correspondence college that served external students of the University of London, where he made himself invaluable as a designer of teaching materials and editor of the house journal, and taught a course in biology for London-based students. Before long he was earning £300 per year. He became an external student himself, and obtained his B.Sc., taking first-class honours in Zoology, thus wiping out the humiliation of his expulsion from the Normal School of Science. He began to project for himself a career in education, but he had not given up his literary ambitions, and succeeded in placing an essay of scientific speculation called ‘The Rediscovery of the Unique’, developed from a paper he had given to the College Debating Society, with the prestigious and progressive Fortnightly Review . He sent the letter of acceptance to Simmons with a jubilant note scribbled on the back: ‘ Is this the dove with a sprig of bay? Is it poor Pilgrim’s first glimpse of the white and shining city? Or a mirage? ’ It was not a mirage, but all this effort took its toll on his health and he had two more serious episodes of illness, one with another haemorrhage. On each occasion he went back to work, after short periods of convalescence, with undiminished zeal, driven by the need to save enough money to marry Isabel and at last consummate his love for her.
In spite of that unhappy conversation
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