No longer human kite11/11/2023 ![]() Her hair, suspiciously black for her age, was always very neat, and she wore it in the style of Queen Victoria's daughters, which she had adopted as soon as she was old enough to put it up and had never thought fit to change. She was a little woman, but strong, active, and wiry, with a sallow skin, sharp, regular features, and small beady eyes. 'Beatrice I was christened,' she said, 'and Beatrice I always have been and always shall be, to you and to my nearest and dearest.' Mrs Sunbury's first name was Beatrice, and when she got engaged to Mr Sunbury and he ventured to call her Bea she put her foot down firmly. 'No, he isn't, he's a perfectly reasonable, quite intelligent, decent fellow.' Herbert Sunbury was his name, and his mother, who was very refined, never allowed him to be called Herb or Bertie, but always Herbert, just as she never called her husband Sam but only Samuel. He says he'll never forgive her for that till his dying day.' I tell him he can't let her starve, and all he says is: "Why not?" He's perfectly well behaved, he's no trouble, he works well, he seems quite happy, he's just getting a lot of fun out of thinking what a devil of a time his wife is having.' He says he'll stay in jail all his life rather than pay her a penny. I've told him he's only cutting off his nose to spite his face. I've argued with him till I was blue in the face. 'He left his wife and the court ordered him to pay so much a week in alimony and he's absolutely refused to pay it. 'I've got a funny chap to deal with at the Scrubs just now,' he said, after a pause, 'and I'm blowed if I know how to deal with him.' We had been dining together at the Café Royal in that long, low room with its absurd and charming decoration which is all that remains of the old Café Royal that painters have loved to paint and we were sitting over our coffee and liqueurs and, so far as Ned was concerned against his doctor's orders, smoking very long and very good Havanas. He took his duties very seriously and made the prisoners' troubles his own. In a previous story I have related what I thought the reader should know about Ned Preston, and so now I need only remind him that my friend was a prison visitor at Wormwood Scrubs. ![]() It was told me one evening by my friend Ned Preston, and he told it me because he didn't know how to deal with the circumstances and he thought, quite wrongly as it happened, that I might be able to give him some advice that would help him. I can only relate the facts and leave it at that.įirst of all I must make it plain that it is not my story and that I knew none of the persons with whom it is concerned. I found nothing in my re-reading of Freud's works that cast any light on the subject I had in mind. ![]() The writer may be bitter, harsh, and brutal, while the man may be so meek and mild that he wouldn't say boo to a goose. As we know, there is often a great difference between the man and the writer. I believe, however, that he was a kindly and benign old party. It was something of a task, for he is a dull and verbose writer, and the acrimony with which he claims to have originated such and such a theory shows a vanity and a jealousy of others working in the same field which somewhat ill become the man of science. Now, I have read a good deal by Freud, and some books by his followers, and intending to write this story I have recently flipped through again the volume published by the Modern Library which contains his basic writings. Of course the first thing that occurs to me is that there is something Freudian about it. I don't understand it myself and if I set it down in black and white it is only with a faint hope that when I have written it I may get a clearer view of it, or rather with the hope that some reader, better acquainted with the complications of human nature than I am, may offer me an explanation that will make it comprehensible to me. M Why the British Are Hated in Asia (1954) M Stendhal and Le Rouge et le Noir (1954) M The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian (1898) M Of Human Bondage with a Digression on the Art of Fiction (1946) M Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice (1954) M Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights (1954) M Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov (1954) M Charles Dickens and David Copperfiled (1954)
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