came back with nothing.
“I expect they’ve hidden themselves elsewhere by now,” explained North, “owing to the publicity we gave them.”
“Anyway,” said Bloom, “it was a good story,” as he sauntered away jingling his money. So was Phillip’s story of the young cuckoo being fed by many Cockney sparrows in one of the street-lamps lining the Mall to Buckingham Palace. “But don’t turn the paper into Zoological Notes and Queries ,” Bloom called over his shoulder.
Aug. 2. Six years ago I was getting my service kit together for General Mobilisation. France was waiting with strained face for Britain’s verdict, the French Socialist Jaures was assassinated in Paris, and I felt the shadow of a long and terrible war upon the world. Now memory of my Army days is as far away as the mind’s conception of Caesar’s landing on the Kent coast. My boyhood friends are compost in the earth, or (more bitter) estranged.
Aug. 4. Tonight I am ill, my inner nature parched and lost. This morning I returned from Folkestone, having bidden farewell to Spica, my only dear, at the station. I said goodbye cheerfully and smiling; she just looked at me, her eyes large and sad, while her lips scarcely formulated “Goodbye”. I could not fathom her deep heart.
Later, Bloom told me that I hadn’t turned out so good a reporter as he had hoped. Failure, and so early. I hear nothing about my novel’s reception by Rabbitsons; another failure, I suppose.
It is bitter to think that I have failed all round. Except for a few essays, my writing is unsaleable. No one really wants to read musings. I quite understand why Spica wants only to be friends: what have I that is loveable, for I am not really human? All is in my mind, or head. I dream with my eyes open, I cannot truly feel, only observe. I mean, I can feel, I do feel, deeply, but it is all purely personal to me. As her mother told me sharply: I am moody and unsociable.
It is true. Ordinary talk seems to poison me. I, who love life passionately, the wild birds and the flowers so deeply that their very movements, forms, and feelings penetrate to my brain almost with their own identities, who think of Spica so holily and absolutely—I am nothing to any of them. Just an animated and observing movement. I am no more than a poppy, the red-weed of the farmer, a spilt blood-drop of flower in the corn, an outlaw, flower of sleep and death, whose seeds in a dry skull rattle to earth like shrapnel. Why does the poppy bloom? The scythe cuts it down, and who shall care? It is terrible to think that.
Chapter 4
LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
The London season was over; the town houses of the established rich were closed, the servants on board-wages. The search for stories was harder than ever. The repeated cry on his return of “What’ve yer got?” sometimes drove him to near-frenzy; but he controlled himself, made himself go limp—his safety-valve when under bombardment. He no longer looked on Bloom, as the hours drew on to Saturday midnight, as a slave-driver. Bloom was driven, too. Perhaps a rival Sunday paper, procured in an early edition by some bribed agent, revealed a story one of the reporters had missed. It was hastily paraphrased, and shoved into the next edition. The Chief, who read all editions of his papers like a hawk watching for movement below its shadow, might ask, “Why hasn’t The Weekly Courier got that story?” Everyone was worried and strained. Supposing a scoop were missed? Copy after copy of rival Sunday papers was smuggled in. It was known that the Chief had got a down on Bloom. The Chief was a man of immense vitality, with strong likes and dislikes. One week the Golf Correspondent described a match and used the sentence, He drove the ball four hundred feet, putting it out of bounds. The Chief read the word putting as a specialised stroke, a putt: and it was explained to him that it was used in the meaning of placing the ball out of bounds. Yet day after day
“I expect they’ve hidden themselves elsewhere by now,” explained North, “owing to the publicity we gave them.”
“Anyway,” said Bloom, “it was a good story,” as he sauntered away jingling his money. So was Phillip’s story of the young cuckoo being fed by many Cockney sparrows in one of the street-lamps lining the Mall to Buckingham Palace. “But don’t turn the paper into Zoological Notes and Queries ,” Bloom called over his shoulder.
Aug. 2. Six years ago I was getting my service kit together for General Mobilisation. France was waiting with strained face for Britain’s verdict, the French Socialist Jaures was assassinated in Paris, and I felt the shadow of a long and terrible war upon the world. Now memory of my Army days is as far away as the mind’s conception of Caesar’s landing on the Kent coast. My boyhood friends are compost in the earth, or (more bitter) estranged.
Aug. 4. Tonight I am ill, my inner nature parched and lost. This morning I returned from Folkestone, having bidden farewell to Spica, my only dear, at the station. I said goodbye cheerfully and smiling; she just looked at me, her eyes large and sad, while her lips scarcely formulated “Goodbye”. I could not fathom her deep heart.
Later, Bloom told me that I hadn’t turned out so good a reporter as he had hoped. Failure, and so early. I hear nothing about my novel’s reception by Rabbitsons; another failure, I suppose.
It is bitter to think that I have failed all round. Except for a few essays, my writing is unsaleable. No one really wants to read musings. I quite understand why Spica wants only to be friends: what have I that is loveable, for I am not really human? All is in my mind, or head. I dream with my eyes open, I cannot truly feel, only observe. I mean, I can feel, I do feel, deeply, but it is all purely personal to me. As her mother told me sharply: I am moody and unsociable.
It is true. Ordinary talk seems to poison me. I, who love life passionately, the wild birds and the flowers so deeply that their very movements, forms, and feelings penetrate to my brain almost with their own identities, who think of Spica so holily and absolutely—I am nothing to any of them. Just an animated and observing movement. I am no more than a poppy, the red-weed of the farmer, a spilt blood-drop of flower in the corn, an outlaw, flower of sleep and death, whose seeds in a dry skull rattle to earth like shrapnel. Why does the poppy bloom? The scythe cuts it down, and who shall care? It is terrible to think that.
Chapter 4
LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
The London season was over; the town houses of the established rich were closed, the servants on board-wages. The search for stories was harder than ever. The repeated cry on his return of “What’ve yer got?” sometimes drove him to near-frenzy; but he controlled himself, made himself go limp—his safety-valve when under bombardment. He no longer looked on Bloom, as the hours drew on to Saturday midnight, as a slave-driver. Bloom was driven, too. Perhaps a rival Sunday paper, procured in an early edition by some bribed agent, revealed a story one of the reporters had missed. It was hastily paraphrased, and shoved into the next edition. The Chief, who read all editions of his papers like a hawk watching for movement below its shadow, might ask, “Why hasn’t The Weekly Courier got that story?” Everyone was worried and strained. Supposing a scoop were missed? Copy after copy of rival Sunday papers was smuggled in. It was known that the Chief had got a down on Bloom. The Chief was a man of immense vitality, with strong likes and dislikes. One week the Golf Correspondent described a match and used the sentence, He drove the ball four hundred feet, putting it out of bounds. The Chief read the word putting as a specialised stroke, a putt: and it was explained to him that it was used in the meaning of placing the ball out of bounds. Yet day after day
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