in bundles for firewood.Perhaps the supply would give out sooner than I suppose. A lot of the variety is repetitious. After all, certain pieces that I recognize when I see them again (for instance, that bit of ‘Diving Girl’ apple box) go up and down with the tide for a week or more before I lose sight of them.
Human corpses are rare. If one can catch a corpse and pull it out, one is paid seven shillings and sixpence.I wouldn’t do it for that. And I suppose one also would have to give evidence at the inquest. No, I would leave the corpse for someone else to earn money with. There go the river police in their motor launch. They are watching suspiciously in case I throw my apple core out of the window. It is a prosecutable offence. I will wait until they have gone. Here comes the
Mary Blake
. I am getting toknow the tugs well. I can distinguish the
Mary Blake
, the
Vixen
or the
Elsa
at half a mile. But every day something new of one sort or another goes by. One early morning last year was sensational. There went by an opera hat, a submarine, and a seal. Today I am content with the dabchicks and the lemons. At low tide I expect the old woman with the sack and the old man who pokes about under the stonesand puts what he finds into jam jars. He would puzzle you, but I have been at this window long enough to find out what he is after. He is an anthology poem by William Wordsworth, ‘The Leech Gatherer’. Plenty of leeches on these beaches. The demand, I hear, is steady. Whether from extremely old-fashioned doctors or from extremely modern ones I do not know. Or care much at the moment. I am busybeing pleased with the river, which is now as still as a lake, at the exact balance of the tide. A child’s ball floats motionless under the window. I am tempted to get up and rescue it. But it looks as though it mightn’t bounce. I’ll stay in bed a little longer.
The Shout
WHEN WE ARRIVED with our bags at the Asylum cricket ground, the chief medical officer, whom I had met at the house where I was staying, came up to shake hands. I told him that I was only scoring for the Lampton team today (I had broken a finger the week before, keeping wicket on a bumpy pitch). He said: ‘Oh, then you’ll have an interesting companion.’
‘The other scoresman?’ I asked.
‘Crossley is the most intelligent man in the asylum,’ answered the doctor, ‘a wide reader, a first-class chess-player, and so on. He seems to have travelled all over the word. He’s been sent here for delusions. His most serious delusion is that he’s a murderer, and his story is that he killed two men and a woman at Sydney, Australia. The other delusion, which is more humorous, is that his soul issplit in pieces – whatever that means. He edits our monthly magazine, he stage manages our Christmas theatricals, and he gave a most original conjuring performance the other day. You’ll like him.’
He introduced me. Crossley, a big man of forty or fifty, had a queer, not unpleasant, face. But I felt a little uncomfortable, sitting next to him in the scoring box, his black-whiskered hands so closeto mine. I had no fear of physical violence, only the sense of being in the presence of a man of unusual force, even perhaps, it somehow came to me, of occult powers.
It was hot in the scoring box in spite of the wide window. ‘Thunderstorm weather,’ said Crossley, who spoke in what country people call a ‘college voice’, though I could not identify the college. ‘Thunderstorm weather makes us patientsbehave even more irregularly than usual.’
I asked whether any patients were playing.
‘Two of them, this first wicket partnership. The tall one, B.C. Brown, played for Hants three years ago, and the other is a good club player. Pat Slingsby usually turns out for us too – the Australian fast bowler, you know – but we are dropping him today. In weather like this he is apt to bowl at the batsman’shead. He is not insane in the usual sense, merely
Human corpses are rare. If one can catch a corpse and pull it out, one is paid seven shillings and sixpence.I wouldn’t do it for that. And I suppose one also would have to give evidence at the inquest. No, I would leave the corpse for someone else to earn money with. There go the river police in their motor launch. They are watching suspiciously in case I throw my apple core out of the window. It is a prosecutable offence. I will wait until they have gone. Here comes the
Mary Blake
. I am getting toknow the tugs well. I can distinguish the
Mary Blake
, the
Vixen
or the
Elsa
at half a mile. But every day something new of one sort or another goes by. One early morning last year was sensational. There went by an opera hat, a submarine, and a seal. Today I am content with the dabchicks and the lemons. At low tide I expect the old woman with the sack and the old man who pokes about under the stonesand puts what he finds into jam jars. He would puzzle you, but I have been at this window long enough to find out what he is after. He is an anthology poem by William Wordsworth, ‘The Leech Gatherer’. Plenty of leeches on these beaches. The demand, I hear, is steady. Whether from extremely old-fashioned doctors or from extremely modern ones I do not know. Or care much at the moment. I am busybeing pleased with the river, which is now as still as a lake, at the exact balance of the tide. A child’s ball floats motionless under the window. I am tempted to get up and rescue it. But it looks as though it mightn’t bounce. I’ll stay in bed a little longer.
The Shout
WHEN WE ARRIVED with our bags at the Asylum cricket ground, the chief medical officer, whom I had met at the house where I was staying, came up to shake hands. I told him that I was only scoring for the Lampton team today (I had broken a finger the week before, keeping wicket on a bumpy pitch). He said: ‘Oh, then you’ll have an interesting companion.’
‘The other scoresman?’ I asked.
‘Crossley is the most intelligent man in the asylum,’ answered the doctor, ‘a wide reader, a first-class chess-player, and so on. He seems to have travelled all over the word. He’s been sent here for delusions. His most serious delusion is that he’s a murderer, and his story is that he killed two men and a woman at Sydney, Australia. The other delusion, which is more humorous, is that his soul issplit in pieces – whatever that means. He edits our monthly magazine, he stage manages our Christmas theatricals, and he gave a most original conjuring performance the other day. You’ll like him.’
He introduced me. Crossley, a big man of forty or fifty, had a queer, not unpleasant, face. But I felt a little uncomfortable, sitting next to him in the scoring box, his black-whiskered hands so closeto mine. I had no fear of physical violence, only the sense of being in the presence of a man of unusual force, even perhaps, it somehow came to me, of occult powers.
It was hot in the scoring box in spite of the wide window. ‘Thunderstorm weather,’ said Crossley, who spoke in what country people call a ‘college voice’, though I could not identify the college. ‘Thunderstorm weather makes us patientsbehave even more irregularly than usual.’
I asked whether any patients were playing.
‘Two of them, this first wicket partnership. The tall one, B.C. Brown, played for Hants three years ago, and the other is a good club player. Pat Slingsby usually turns out for us too – the Australian fast bowler, you know – but we are dropping him today. In weather like this he is apt to bowl at the batsman’shead. He is not insane in the usual sense, merely
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