The Final Plunge 241
to see about a settlement I’m making in case I ever
get married.” ,
And then, not half an hour afterwards, he referred
to an incident of our life in Capri. I am careful not
to contradict him or alarm him about the state of his
mind, but it’s very difficult to know what to do. There
are so many things I forget myself.
“How did we get down here?’ Then again,
“Where is Alice ?’’ The name keeps on popping up,
and yet I don’t know any one at all intimately or
importantly with that name.
I had forgotten this diary—I found it by accident
and immediately began to read it through to refresh
my memory.
Most of the handwriting is unreadable. I puzzled
and puzzled before I could make out the words. And
then when I got the words, they were so senseless. I
can’t believe that all that happened to me. Some of it
came back slowly; curiously, the unimportant things
came first.
I was amazed to find that Mabel Black was dead.
I wrote her a letter only yesterday. Poor old girl !
The part, too, about Dr. McCall. I could swear quite
honestly that never happened. And yet it must have;
for I found scraps of the dress in the cushions of the
blue Chesterfield chewed to a pulp. ...
October 27
We have been shooting again; but it was cold and
damp. We were neither of us interested and we were
too weary to walk. Peter said nothing; but all the
time I can feel how disgusted he is. We're so rottenly
let down. This afternoon I picked up that article of
Sieveking’s. He is talking about the sensation of
walking after a flight.
“One has an infinitely distressing sensation of
being clamped down to the ground—manacled
by the very grass-blades ! ”