“Sardines? Again? I tell you I can’t eat them.”
“We ought to be glad to eat what is given to us.”
“Don’t throw up quotations like that at me just to annoy me. Do you hear? Given, who said it was given? I paid for it, didn’t I? You hate me, and everyone hates me.”
But that was as it should be, he ought to take a pride in the hatred of the world. It was ever so with the great. But sardines, he paid for them. There had been a time when he had thanked God for sardines, because he had always hated them so that he saw in them his cross. But what was the good? He paid for them, and ate them because it was better than eating dry bread. After all he had paid for them, and if he had not paid he would not have got them, so where did thanks come in? He ought only to thank that oil-well in Southern Texas where Hoyner the cinema-man came from. There had been a time when he had thanked God for oil-wells, wars and apples, while these were nothing but unfortunate mistakes, he having lost half his money in Mexican oil, and apples being bad for his digestion. Why did he keep that money in oil?—it would go like the other half had. But it was so awkward changing. It was all so difficult. But then if no one ate fish the industry would die and with it the fishermen. No, thank God, he could see nothing divine in anything now, whereas in the old days he had eaten even a sardine with considerable emotion. Yet how could one be sure? His reason, how it tortured him, how it pursued round and round, coldly, in his brain. He had a fine intellect, too. Edward had told him that thirty years ago at Oxford. And it had been growing, growing ever since in his hermit existence, even Joan did not deny it. . . . He was even more of a genius because he was recognised in his home, a very rare thing surely. And his reward would come, it must come. Yes, he would start work this very morning. But he felt so ill, weak.
“I feel so ill this morning, child. I have such a headache. And I am so weak”—physically only, of course; no, not mentally.
“Have a drop of gin in your milk. That will make it all right.”
“Yes, I think you are right”—but no more than one, really.
He was always like that before the morning one. Poor Father.
That is better, more comfortable. But still there may be something wrong with him. He swallows another gin-and-milk.
“It’s the cancer, Joan, that’s what I am so terrified about. I can feel it glowing hot. We can’t afford an operation or morphia. I shall die.”