Well, Just As Our Cab Mounted The Small Hill On Which Our House Stood,
The Faithful Clerk, With More Zeal Than Discretion, Said, "You Look
Awful Ill, Sir; Why Your Face Is As White As My Shirt." I Looked At His
Shirt, Seemingly Guiltless, For Days Past, Of The Washerwoman.
But I was within three minutes of home:
And I was distressed at the
thought of alarming my wife, who was not in a condition to be alarmed.
So, with what little strength I had left, I rubbed my forehead, face,
nose, lips, chin, with my clenched fist, to restore some slight colour.
Entering our door, I said, "I am rather worn out, and will go to bed.
Up all night. Work done. Now, please, I will go to bed."
So, after every affectionate care that a good wife could pay, I
swallowed my narcotic pill - and slept, slept, slept - till, at eight in
the morning, the sun was coming in, charmingly, through the windows.
Nothing seemed to ail me. What weakness, what nonsense, said I. But I
had promised to remain in bed till Mr. Smith came. But I sent down for
my clerks, and at 11 a.m. I was in full activity, dictating to one man,
listening to another, and giving orders to a third, in, as I thought,
the fullest voice - when in came Mr. Smith. He looked round in doubt,
and then went down stairs. I have only just forgiven him for that. For
in a moment up came my wife. "Edward," she said, "Mr. Smith declares
that if you do not give over at once, you will have brain fever." Oh!
unwise Smith. The words were hardly out of my wife's mouth, when I felt
I could do no more. Had the world been offered to me, I could have done
no more.
Alas! my nerve was gone.
At that tune I was working for a livelihood. Fortunate that it was so,
otherwise a lunatic asylum, or a permanent state of what the doctors
call hypochondriasis, might have followed.
After some years of struggle with this nerve-demon, the child of
overwork, I wrote, in 1850: -
"I am not fond of writing, and I know I must do it badly. Still I feel
that the little narrative I am about to put together may do some good
to some few people who may be suffering. I know that the roughest and
dullest book ever written, had it contained a similar relation to this
of mine, would have brought balm to my mind and hope to my heart not
many years ago. And who knows but that other men (for the scenes of
this world, and its good and evil, are very much alike), may be
suffering as I did, and may therefore be influenced by my rude
scribbling, as I might have been by some of theirs?
"There was a time, and not a very distant one either, when I was
utterly ignorant of two things - first, the existence, in my particular
case, of the thing called the human stomach; and secondly, the reality
of those mysterious telegraphic wires - yclept NERVES. Often nave I
sneered at 'bilious subjects,' 'dyspepsia,' and that long string of
woes which one hears of, in such luxuriance of description, usually
over breakfast, at Clifton, Tonbridge, or Harrogate. Like the old
Duchess of Marlborough, too, I used 'to thank God I was born before
nerves came into fashion.'
"But 'live and learn.' I have lived; and I have learnt the utter misery
which a deranged digestion and jarring nerves, acting and reacting upon
each other, can inflict upon their victims. To be laid up in bed for a
month with a violent disease is nothing. You are killed or cured; made
better, and your illness forgotten even by yourself; or quietly laid
under the dust of your mother earth, to lie there in oblivion, the busy
world moving on, unheeding, over your cold remains, till the great day
of judgment. But to have, as it were, your whole 'mind, body, soul, and
strength' turned, with a resistless fascination, into the frightened
study of your own dreadful anatomy. To find your courage quail, not
before real danger, but at phantoms and shadows - nay, actually at your
own horrid self - to feel every act of life and every moment of business
a task, an effort, a trial, and a pain. Sometimes to be unable to sleep
for a week - sometimes to sleep, but, at the dead of night, to wake,
your bed shaking under you from the violent palpitation of your heart,
and your pillow drenched with cold sweat pouring from you in streams.
But, worst of all, if you are of a stubborn, dogged, temper, and are
blessed with a strong desire to 'get on' - to feel yourself unable to
make some efforts at all, to find yourself breaking down before all the
world in others, and to learn, at last, in consequence, almost to hate
the half-dead and failing carcase tied to your still living will. This,
not for months only, but for YEARS. Years, too, in what ought to be
your prime of manhood. Ah! old age and incapacity at thirty is a
bitter, bitter punishment. Better be dead than suffer it; for you must
suffer it alone and in silence - you may not hope for sympathy - you dare
not desire it - you see no prospect of relief - you wage a double
warfare, with the world and with yourself. I do not, I dare not,
exaggerate. Indeed, a lady of a certain age could hardly feel more
abashed at the sudden production of her baptismal certificate than I - a
man, a matter-of-fact man, a plain, hard-headed, unimaginative man of
business - do, at this confession. Suffice it to say, that in the last
four years I have lived the life of a soul in purgatory or an
inhabitant of the 'Inferno,' and though I have worked like a horse,
determined, if possible, to rout out my evil genii - the wave of health
has gradually receded, till, at last, an internal voice has seemed
solemnly to say, 'Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.'
"If any one, who has not suffered similarly, has patience to read thus
far (which is doubtful), before now he has said, with Mr. Burchell in
the 'Vicar of Wakefield' - 'FUDGE.' No matter - I should have so
exclaimed once; and I now envy him his healthy ignorance.
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