Among the letters sent to me by Mr. Scott is one from a well-known physician who had been consulted on the case.
"There is no doubt," he says, "that there is some tuberculous affection of his lungs, though, so far as I have been able to make out, this does not seem to be at all in an active state.
"The serious complaints which make his life a misery to him I believe to be purely functional. He strikes me as being a very marked example of hysteria in man, though in his case, as in many among women, the commoner phenomena of hysteria are absent. I am surprised to hear that he spoke warmly of my treatment, for he would not admit to his ordinary attendant, nor to me, that his symptoms had undergone any palliation whatever. He is prejudiced against any treatment, and the result, according to him, always agrees with his prediction."
Evidently an extremely difficult and nervous patient to treat. But that might be expected. In October of 1886, Mr. Scott proposed to raise a fund among the friends and admirers of his works which should be devoted to sending him to a warmer climate. He consented, though with pain and bitterness of soul. "I have written," he says, "fourteen books." He enumerates them. "Scarcely anyone living has done so much." Yet he forgets to consider for how small and select an audience he has written. "All of them have been praised by the reviews. I cannot help feeling it hard, after so much work, to come to such disgrace." It was hard, it was cruelly hard. While the pensions of the Civil List—a breach of trust if ever there was one—are bestowed upon daughters of distinguished officers and widows of civil servants, such a man as Jefferies, for whose assistance the grant is yearly asked and voted, is left to starve. It is indeed cruelly hard on literature that the rulers of the country should be so blind, so deaf, so pitiless—so dishonest. They made Burns a gauger. Well: that was something. Could they not have made Jefferies a police-constable, for instance? They gave him nothing: it would have been useless to ask any Government to give anything: they wanted all the money for persons for whom it was never intended. There never has been—there is not now—not even at a time when Prime Ministers and ex-Cabinet Ministers write articles for monthly magazines, any Government which has had the least concern for, knowledge of, or touch with, literature, or its makers. Authors must develop and increase their own Society, and then they will not have to ask the Government for any Civil Pension list at all, and ministers may go on asking for the grant for the support of science and letters, and giving it all to their own creatures, and to the daughters, widows, and sisters of officers. It is hard, it is cruelly hard, as Jefferies said: it is a hardship and a disgrace to all of us that such a man as Jefferies should "come to such disgrace."
Well, the fund was raised, quietly, among the private friends of its promoters. But it came too late for the Algerian or South African expedition. The sick man was sent, however, to the seaside; to a house at Goring, on the Sussex coast. From this place he wrote to Mr. Scott a little history of his illness, the nature of which I have already sketched. The description by a highly-sensitive man, then in a most nervous condition, of the horrible pain which he had been enduring is most terrible to read, and is altogether too terrible to be quoted. I dare not quote the whole of this dreadful story of long-continued agony. Take, however, the end of it. At last his wounds were somehow made to heal.
"Now imagine my joy. The wounds were well at last. I was free. I could walk and sit—actually sit down. I could work. I was very faint and ill, but fresh air would soon set that right. All these expenses had swallowed up a large share of my savings, and I had practically to begin life again. But I did not mind that. I went to work joyously.
"Now judge again of my disappointment. Within two months—in February—I was seized with a mysterious wasting disease, accompanied by much pain. I gradually wasted away to mere bones. By degrees this pain increased till it became almost insupportable. I can compare it to nothing but the flame of a small spirit lamp continually burning within me. Sometimes it seemed like a rat always gnaw, gnaw, night and day. I had no sleep. Everything I ate or drank seemed to add fuel to the flame. The local doctors could do nothing, so I went to London again, and in the course of the two years and more that it lasted I was under five of the leading London physicians. Altogether I had some forty prescriptions, and took something like sixty drugs, besides being put on diet. It was not the slightest use, and it became evident that they had no idea what was really the matter with me. The pain went on, burn, burn, burn. If I wrote a volume I could not describe it to you, this terrible scorching pain, night and day. There is nothing in medical books like it, except the pain that follows corrosive sublimate which burns the tissues. It was at times so maddening that I dreaded to go a few miles alone by rail lest I should throw myself out of the window of the carriage. I worked and wrote all this time, and some of my best work was done in this intense agony. I received letters from New Zealand, from the United States, even from the islands of the Pacific, from people who had read my writings. It seemed so strange that I should read these letters, and yet all the time, to be writhing in agony.
"At last, in April, 1885, nature gave way, and I broke down utterly, and could only lie on the sofa in a fainting condition. In a few days I became so helpless and weak that there appeared little chance of my living. Someone suggested that Dr. Kidd should be sent for. He came on Sunday morning, and found me nearly ended. I was fainting during the examination. He discovered that it was ulceration of the intestines. You know how painful an ulcer is anywhere—say on your lip—now for over two years this ulceration had been burning its way in the intestines.
"He put me on milk diet, malt bread, malt extract, malted food, meat shredded and pounded in a mortar, raw beef, and so on. In forty-eight hours the pain was better. For three weeks I improved and hoped. I think that had the diet been then altered to the ordinary food, I might have made a recovery; instead of which it was kept up for nine weeks, at the end of which I had lost all the improvement, and was so weak that I could but just crawl up and down stairs. I attribute my subsequent exhaustion to the continued use of milk, which has the effect of destroying nervous energy."
'Oct. 22, 1886.
"I have been obliged to set all aside from extreme feebleness. During the last four weeks, indeed, the weakness and emaciation have become very great, so much so that I almost fancy the bones waste. But what I feel most is the loss of fresh air from inability to go out. The last two days have been dry, so that I have been able to get up and down by the house a little.
"Still, I should have managed somehow to write to you were it not for the great dislike I feel to this begging business. You must not take offence at this, though you may think me very foolish. I keep putting it off and putting it off, till now I suppose I must do it, or stay the winter indoors in helplessness. To-day I have written to obtain the information necessary to fill up the form you sent.
"In September, 1885, my spine seemed suddenly to snap. It happened in ten minutes—quite suddenly. It felt as if one of the vertebræ had been taken away. It was no doubt a form of paralysis. I had to take to the sofa again, and was confined to the house for over seven months, quite helpless. I could not undress myself. At Christmas, other troubles set in; the local doctor gave me up. He told my wife that nothing could be done for me, and that the only hope was in my keeping in good spirits. The misery of that dreadful winter will never be forgotten. At length nature seemed to revive a little, and I got downstairs, and soon after Miss Scott came to see me, and you sent me to the sea. On returning from the sea I slowly lost ground again. In the summer I had an attack of vomiting blood—of itself enough to alarm most people. By October I was confined indoors again. At last I got down here.
"Besides all these sufferings I had another trial—a loss by death—one that I cannot dwell upon;"—it was the death of his youngest child—"but it broke me down very much.
"Of the loss of all my savings I need not say much. But it is difficult to begin the world afresh"—alas! he was just about to end the world—"even with good health.
"With truth I think I may say that there are few, very few, perhaps none, living who have gone through such a series of diseases. There are many dead—many who have killed themselves for a tenth part of the pain—there are few living.
"My wearied and exhausted system constantly craves rest. My brain is always asking for rest. I never sleep. I have not slept now for five years properly, always waking, with broken bits of sleep, and restlessness, and in the morning I get up more weary than I went to bed. Rest, that is what I need. You thought naturally that it was work I needed; but I have been at work, and next time I will tell you all of it. It is not work, it is rest for the brain and the nervous system. I have always had a suspicion that it was the ceaseless work that caused me to go wrong at first.
"It has taken me a long time to write this letter; it will take you but a few minutes to read it. Had you not sent me to the sea in the spring I do not think that I should have been alive to write it."
Was there ever a more miserable tale of slow torture? Parts of it—the parts relating to his operations—I have omitted. Enough remains. Picture to yourself this tall, gaunt man reduced to a skeleton, not able to use his pen for more than a few minutes at a time, his spine broken down, spitting blood, lying back on the sofa, his mind full of splendid thoughts which he cannot put upon paper, dictating sometimes when he was strong enough, resolved on making money so as to save himself the "disgrace" of applying to the Literary Fund, full of pain by day and night, growing daily weaker, but never losing heart or hope—is there in the whole calamitous history of authors a picture more full of sadness and of pity than this?
He writes again on January 10, 1887. He is no worse. The letter is about money matters—that is to say, he has no money.
On February 2 he writes again. He has been able to dictate a little.
"I hope to be able to do more work after a time; when the weather becomes sufficiently warm for me to sit out of doors. With me the power to write is almost entirely dependent upon being out of doors. Confined indoors, I have nothing to write, and I cannot express my ideas if they do occur to me so boldly. You have no idea what a difference it makes. A little air and movement seem to brighten up the mind and give it play. I am in hope, too, that as the warmth comes on the sea will help me more. Up to the present the winter has gone well."
The last letter to Mr. Scott was written on March 23. He is pleased and surprised to hear that the fund raised for him amounts to so much. Perhaps it will enable him to go abroad presently. Meantime, he has had a relapse—an attack of hæmorrhage—"and then so feeble that I have not been able to dictate. This loss of time worries me more than I can tell you."