intimations on a buff slip and filling in
a form. I saw a telegraph boy taking the telegram to my home. He stopped
on the way in order to talk to a friend. Then he whistled and threw a
stone at a dog. He sauntered through the garden gate and knocked at the
front door. The door opened ... but I could not face the rest, and with
a tremendous mental impulse I turned my mind away to other things. But
my terrible thoughts lay in wait for me like tigers ready to rush upon
me as soon as my will relaxed its efforts. I tried to compromise, and I
imagined myself killed and invented all the details of a post-mortem
examination and burial. I found some relief in these imaginings, but
soon that implacable telegram claimed my attention once more and drew me
on to what I dared not face. I sought distraction by muttering some
verses of poetry to myself. They had no meaning to me, they were just
empty sound and their rhythm had a hideous pulsation like that other
pulsation overhead:

"He above the rest
In shape and gesture proudly eminent
Stood like a tower...."

and so on, line after line. The dreariness of the verses grew so intense
as to be almost intolerable. At the same time I was dimly conscious of
the fact that at one time I thought this passage beautiful. But the beat
of the blank verse carried me on. Sometimes it seemed to blend with the
buzzing of those angry wasps above and sometimes the two rhythms would
vie with each other for speed, so that they hurried along each
alternately ahead of the other. I came to a line where my memory failed
me. I faltered for a moment, but the droning sound seemed to grow into
an enormous roar, and I leapt back to the beginning:

"He above the rest...."

and then on and on a second time until my head throbbed with the double
pulsation.

Suddenly a man who had been lying on the far side of the marquee got up
and said:

"I've had enough of this, I'm going to sleep in a ditch."

He went off. The wasps were still buzzing, but the interruption had
broken the spell. I felt a sense of relief. I became conscious of
intense weariness and felt ashamed of my fears. I cursed the German
aeroplanes and thought, "Let them do their worst, I don't care." I made
up my mind to go to sleep and resolutely buried my face in my pillow.
Then it occurred to me that I would never be able to enjoy _Paradise
Lost_ again, and I was half-amused and agreeably distracted by the
trivial thought.

But