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I was not a bright boy; I was
not a stupid one. Indeed, I have a kind of feeling now that I was one of
those dreary, sensible boys who provoke people because they find a fellow is
so sensible—for a boy. I scarcely ever got into scrapes, which makes me
wonder now how I pushed my way in the world so well in after-life ; for boys
who have not spirit enough in them to get into scrapes are generally slow,
steady-going fellows who live and die within the radius of a small and
narrow local vision.
At. school I did not shine,
and could only just manage to keep a little above the middle of my class. I
well remember I used to wonder why this was so, because I felt myself a
better fellow than those beside me, and my companions were invariably those
at the head of the class. In after-years the reason why dawned upon me, and
I came to the conclusion—in confidence to myself—that I really should have
been a tremendously clever man if I had not, most unfortunately for myself
and the world at large, of course, been born with only—half a memory! This
has been my bane through life; to save that life I could not at this moment
tell you the year in which I was born. Little wonder that I was only in time
middle form, little wonder my poor mother used to deplore that she never
once knew me to say my Sunday lessons without a blunder. So hopeless was I,
that she once offered a sovereign whenever I could repeat to her a chapter
from the Bible without making a mistake. Did I not, one Sunday, with a sort
of mean feeling that I was not doing the right thing, go to her to claim the
trial, and repeat a chapter from the old Testament? I had managed to find
one with only a couple of verses! The old lady was equal to the occasion,
and, looking sternly at me, asked, "Is that a chapter from the New
Testament?"
Of course I was ashamed to
tell her she had said a chapter from the Bible. She had bowled me over,
and—I never pocketed the sovereign!
With herculean labour I do
remember managing to learn the song "If I had a donkey," thinking all the
time what a marvelously stupid one I was myself, a belief confirmed beyond
all contradiction when three days afterwards I in vain endeavoured to repeat
"If I had a donkey." No, I had none other than myself - had to sigh and give
it up. I had not then discovered that I had been born with only half a
memory or I might have been consoled.
My school-days were pain and
grief to me. I learned, l but only to forget; it was as hopeless as the task
of trying to carry water in a sieve. I grew up a horrid, classicless,
sensible lad; I laboured at Latin and Greek through the accepted curriculum
of school and college for over six years—in my case a direful waste of my
young life. My masters thought well of me, over much of me though only
figuring in the middle of my class; but I did differ from those on each side
of me, for they never attempted an "essay," and I always got my half-holiday
for my composition. If I could not retain I could create there was something
in me, in myself, however much I allowed what others ordained to be driven
into me, to run out again, and before my school-days were ended fearful was
the quantity which had run out.
And what next? What was I
going to be? Only sons generally have little difficulty in fixing the
grooves in which their lives are to run, for in nine cases out of ten it is
fixed for them; they follow in their father's wake, if there are two boys,
people will ask "What are you going to be?" of the second, it being taken
for granted the eldest is entitled to succeed his father, be it in his
estates or in his business. Of course I was going to be a doctor—it never
entered my mind to be anything else—it was a fixed and determined thing
before I had brains enough to think about it myself. And I found myself
becoming a doctor accordingly.
But as the time kept slipping
past which was converting me into a doctor, I had brains enough to force
home the conclusion that when I fairly was one, the sticking up my name on
brass plate on the door, below my father's, with "Junior" on it, would not
add to his practice; nor did I see, as long as he was alive and well, how it
would bring me any. What connection I had was his already; he was hale and
hearty, and up to more work than he had to do. And so it came about that by
degrees, slow but sure, it became a fixed idea in my mind that I would push
my fortune abroad somewhere or other. I am quite satisfied now that in this
conclusion there came out some of the "sensible fellow" that I had been
christened by my friends.
Doubtless you will be
wondering how it came about that a man with only half a memory managed to
pass his examinations, but with superhuman perseverance I did so. True, I
was still a mere sieve, but I kept pouring the thousands of facts which I
had to "be up in" in such an incessant stream through my brain that the
necessary quantum got entangled therein somehow or other for the ordeal of
examinations.
But it was hard work. For six
months before going up for the degree of' physician, and diploma of
surgeon—for I took both—I had only five hours sleep a night. I was at
college all day attending lectures, not getting home until five o'clock,
then came dinner, and thereafter digestion and the sleepiness of worn out
nerves, so that one did not brighten up to work until ten o'clock, then at
it I went, in cold attic room in winter without a fire, wrapped in a cloak,
until two in morning. During these hours the meshes in my brain—my poor
sieve brain--seemed to grow closer, but. it was overstrained work, bordering
on danger both to the mental and bodily system. Sometimes I would protract
my sederunt to half-past two or three, but I soon found that this was not to
be done with impunity. As soon as I exceeded the four hours grind I spoiled
my five hours' sleep. I used to fall into a half-nightmare, half-cataleptic
state, alive to the night-watchman's call and every noise in the street, but
unable to move a muscle of my body.
And I soon learned that two
o'clock was the extreme limit that nature would stand, and so I was
compelled to stick to it. I had to get up at seven o'clock all the winter to
go to attend a lecture at eight.
When spring came I exchanged
that hour's lecture for very different work, as shall be chronicled further
on in these memoirs. |
