was to
be shuffled off at last with no scant relief and reaction. This is
perhaps exactly why the whole picture of our existence at the
Pas-de-Calais watering place pleads to me now for the full indulgence,
what would be in other words every touch of tenderness workable, after
all the years, over the lost and confused and above all, on their own
side, poor ultimately rather vulgarised and violated little sources of
impression: items and aspects these which while they in their degree
and after their sort flourished we only asked to admire, or at least to
appreciate, for their rewarding extreme queerness. The very centre of my
particular consciousness of the place turned too soon to the fact of my
coming in there for the gravest illness of my life, an all but mortal
attack of the malignant typhus of old days; which, after laying me as
low as I could well be laid for many weeks, condemned me to a
convalescence so arduous that I saw my apparently scant possibilities,
by the measure of them then taken, even as through a glass darkly, or
through the expansive blur for which I found just above a homely image.

This experience was to become when I had emerged from it the great
reminiscence or circumstance of old Boulogne for me, and I was to regard
it, with much intelligence, I should have maintained, as the marked
limit of my state of being a small boy. I took on, when I had decently,
and all the more because I had so retardedly, recovered, the sense of
being a boy of other dimensions somehow altogether, and even with a new
dimension introduced and acquired; a dimension that I was eventually to
think of as a stretch in the direction of essential change or of living
straight into a part of myself previously quite unvisited and now made
accessible as by the sharp forcing of a closed door. The blur of
consciousness imaged by my grease-spot was not, I hasten to declare,
without its relenting edges and even, during its major insistence,
fainter thicknesses; short of which, I see, my picture, the picture I
was always so incurably "after," would have failed of animation
altogether--quite have failed to bristle with characteristics, with
figures and objects and scenic facts, particular passages and moments,
the stuff, in short, of that scrap of minor gain which I have spoken of
as our multiplied memories. Wasn't I even at the time, and much more
later on, to feel how we had been, through the thick and thin of the
whole adventure, ass