My life and loves Vol. 4

by Frank Harris

  But the dug-out was salvation, and as I lay in it, I realized that I should now be able to make fifty or sixty miles a day; one lucky shot would give me food, and the current would bring me to civilization in ten days or a fortnight: the mere hope gave me new life. In an hour I had made a couple of rude paddles and had waded through the reeds and pushed into the full stream. No more painful walking or crawling-thank God!

  Luck held with me. That day, or the next, I saw a small hippo standing on the bank. I took most careful aim and fired and he fell to the shot; in a few dozen strokes I was into the bank and beside him: he was dead-the bullet had gone clean through his head just behind the eye. Once only in my life did I feel more of a murderer, but necessity is the first law, so I opened his mouth and cut out his tongue, and went down the river half a mile with it before I lit a little fire and boiled it in my kettle, boiled and boiled and boiled it till it was more than cooked; and I had my first real meal in five or six weeks. It was the turning point-my fever got less from day to day and I slept interminably; one thing only bothered me: my beard grew inordinately and there were some grey hairs in it-there were not many-I could still count them, and I was over forty-but I resented their appearance and swore to myself that I wouldn't mount the white feather until I was over sixty, if I could ever get out of Africa.

  I have nothing more to recount of any interest till I got to the first Portuguese settlement, and there I had an amusing experience. I secured my canoe on the bank but I couldn't make up my mind to leave the kettle and a few odds and ends, so I carried them with me. As soon as I got into the street of the little village, every one I came across had a good look at me and then bolted incontinently: children, women, men-everybody. As I passed a barbershop, I thought I would make myself decent before trying to get anything in a restaurant. The barber was shaving a man, but as soon as he saw me he dropped his razor and shot into the back room; the man, half-shaved, got up, indignant, but after one look at me, he slipped out into the street and disappeared; so I went over and looked at myself in the glass. Never was there such an appearance: nose and eyes and a long ill-grown beard on the face of a corpse-I had never seen any human face so thin, and my dirty shirt and clothes, and the kettle in one hand, and all my belongings in the other; I don't wonder that the people fled. I knocked at the inner room and the barber ventured out as soon as he saw the gold sovereign — I had a good deal of money about me. In a little while he cut off my beard and shaved me, but even then my face frightened me: it was emaciated, a skeleton-face. I asked the barber for a restaurant and he pointed on down the street to one, and in five minutes I was seated at a table with a beefsteak in front of me. I ate very little because I was afraid of indigestion, and with good reason: in an hour I had thrown up most of what I had eaten; and I was back in the restaurant to try something else, till I saw it was useless. My stomach had been ruined by the berries and leaves I had eaten: I could digest scarcely anything; meanwhile, half the town came to the restaurant to see me.

  In spite of the heat, I bought an overcoat which covered my rags, and got a room for the night in a decent hotel and had a long hot bath: it seemed impossible to get clean. Before going to bed, I saw the doctor, who was a Portuguese and knew some English. He told me to eat only soup and brought me little arsenic pills that did me a great deal of good. What I weighed then I have no idea, but a month later on the German steamer taking me up the coast, I weighed less than eighty pounds, although my normal weight was then about one hundred and sixty.

  I must explain why I didn't get stouter. Only on the first day was I able to eat and digest a little food. On the second day everything disagreed with me; I had acute spasm after spasm of indigestion. I tried everything, but my stomach was hopelessly enfeebled, partly by the berries and partly by the other indigestible things I had eaten. If any reader wants to know the best thing I had in weeks-it was a small snake, the head of which I cut off and then boiled the body; and the worst thing I ever attempted to eat was a caterpillar; there was a certain red berry which really poisoned me, but the taste of the caterpillar will live with me as long as I live: it was disgusting.

  The doctor on the German liner tried everything to help my digestion, but nothing did me any good. In Germany, Schweninger made me believe that a fast of ten or fourteen days would bring my stomach into good order. I tried the fast and prolonged it till I found my legs failing on going down some stairs; then I began to drink milk and afterwards vegetable soup, and so brought myself gradually to a normal diet. But as soon as I began to eat solids again, I had unbearable indigestion.

  Schweninger taught me nothing except the science of getting thin, which he had proved on Bismarck: his discovery was that drinking with one's meals alone makes fat. If you drink nothing for half an hour before your meals and for two hours after, you will lose weight at the rate of a couple of pounds a day, after the first day or two. By following this regimen, Bismarck, when already old, lost some sixty pounds and came to better health. Later I, too, tried this cure and found it efficacious. Since then, whenever I want to bring my weight down to normal, I simply follow Schweninger's regimen for a few days.

  When I found that I could get no relief from Schweninger, nor, for that matter, from doctors all over Europe, I returned to London. That summer a wellknown specialist told me to put my house in order, for I had only a short time to live. He said, "I cannot hear your heart, and," pointing to some steps on the other side of the road, "if you ran up those steps it would probably kill you."

  The Princess of Monaco had brought me to him, and so when we got out into the street, I ran up and down the steps three times as hard as I could, and laughed with her afterwards.

  A year later, in passing the doctor's house, I went in to call on him. After examining me carefully, he told me that my heart was in perfect condition, my arteries like those of a boy; and he wondered why I had come to him.

  When I referred him to his prediction, he turned my case up in his diary and said he had written that my heart was almost inaudible, weaker than any woman's. He begged me to tell him what I had done and how I had brought about the change.

  I have already explained that it was my house doctor in London who first made me acquainted with the stomach pump. It taught me what I could digest and what I ought to shun, thus giving me a complete and scientific dietary. As I made it a rule to leave off everything that disagreed with me I soon came to almost perfect health.

  Of course, every now and then I sinned a little. If, inspired by company, I drank a little more than I should, the washing out of my stomach cured the evil and gave me perfect rest. If I ate a little too much starch or oil, and the first water of the purging was colored or impure, I gave my stomach another bath, but always went to bed with my stomach as clean as my mouth.

  One fact I may give here, which doctors and scientists may seek to explain.

  After some years of careful dieting I found that I could eat and digest little bread or even butter. Of course, I would only eat the butter or bread at lunch, but sometimes a slight pain in my forehead a couple of hours afterwards taught me that I had indulged too freely: the pain passed away and I took my usual light dinner. Four hours or so later I would wash my stomach out and suddenly the butter, eaten at lunch twelve hours before, would appear. The stomach had allowed all the rest of the lunch and dinner to pass on into the intestines, but had retained the butter to be washed out in due course.

  This fact has made me almost believe that the individual cells of the stomach are semi-rational in some sort, and will act in the interests of the general health.

  One other factor should be mentioned in connection with the stomach pump, and that is the intestinal bath of warm water, which is taken once or twice a week to regulate the bowels and keep them healthy.

  But even the most careful dietary did not bring perfect health without regular exercise. From boyhood on I had exercised pretty carefully both morning and evening. I recognized early that indigestion in adults usually come
s from the fact that they do not move the middle part of the body enough. The child is always bending and stooping, and so exercises the abdomen; but the adult keeps the stomach and bowels almost quiescent. I found that exercising this part of the body was better for health than developing the muscles of the arms and legs and chest. And so for many years my exercises were all taken with a view to bettering my digestion.

  I may note here that I was nearly forty before I had the first attack of indigestion; it was really the dreadful experience on the Zambesi that ruined my stomach. As I grew in years from forty on I found that exercise could easily be too violent: I began to leave off the heavy clubs and large dumbbells I had loved to use in youth.

  Strangers, and even those who know me, are continually surprised and astonished at my almost perfect physical health and a comparative youthfulness of appearance that goes with it. When I explain that my health is due to study of the body and to careful observance of the rules which are conducive to healthy living, they all beg me to publish some of the facts.

  Very few people realize how completely it is within the power of a fairly strong man to make himself perfectly healthy. After my breakdown in health in 1896, I began, as I have said, to study health and digestion in every way possible. In the autumn of this year, I found I was growing bald: a bald spot had appeared on the top of my head. I immediately set myself to think out a remedy. Advancing years, of course, was the real cause, and my spell of ill health; but now that I had regained my health, what was I to do to get rid of the baldness? It seemed to me that the bald spot came chiefly through the use of the hat, which prevented the hairs being blown about and the roots of them exercised; accordingly, I thought of a substitute and I began to scratch my head so as to excite the hairs surrounding the bald spot. In a little while I found that I was right, because the hairs came back and the baldness gradually disappeared: six months did the trick and I have had no trouble since.

  In much the same way, later still, I found my eyes tiring with much reading and writing. I went to the best oculists and got glasses which helped me a little, but soon again, in spite of the glasses, I began to suffer. I had always been short-sighted from astigmatism, but I saw well near at band, and up to about fifty could read for ten or twelve hours a day without noticing any fatigue; now, after four or five hours reading or writing, my eyes used to get blurred for minutes together; I had to put the book down and wait. These weak spells grew more and more frequent at an alarming rate, I went to the oculists, but found they were just as ignorant as the doctors: one recommended different glasses, but no change helped me; another told me that I should be very proud of being able to read two hours at a stretch without suffering. In fact, I got no satisfaction from any of the so-called specialists; whereupon I took the matter up for myself. "You are suffering," I said, "because your eyes move mechanically up and down a page and so grow tired." Thereupon I began to exercise my eyes every morning, casting them from one end of the room all over it to the other, for a quarter of an hour a day. At the end of a month I threw away all my reading glasses and now find that at over seventy I can read or write twelve or fourteen hours a day without trouble, just as I could as a boy. A change of work is almost as good a rest for the eyes as for the other parts of the body.

  I am often asked where I get my knowledge of the body. As a German student fifty years ago, I heard of the celebrated doctor Bilroth in Vienna, and went there and studied under him. I would rather at that time have been a doctor than anything else. There were two sacred orders of mankind to me always: those who diminish pain and those who increase pleasure. I didn't think my self good enough to be a writer or scientist and so give enjoyment, but I did think I could be a great doctor; I soon found that I was taking the science much more seriously than the ordinary students or doctors or even professors.

  I could give dozens of shocking instances of the careless indifference to human suffering, not only of the students and doctors, but also of the nurses; but I will simply give the final one, which made me leave the university. I came into the operating-room one day and found that a doctor had just carried out the difficult operation of cutting a cancer from a woman's breast.

  The room was half-filled with students, which astonished me, and I asked what was the occasion? I was told the doctor had bet a fairly large sum that he would cut the cancer out and finish the operation in a certain number of minutes; I think it was fifteen. I was horrified when he turned around and smiling remarked that he had won. When I looked at the patient I suddenly saw a small trickle of blood on her breast. I pointed and said to the doctor:

  "You have been too hasty." His face changed: he had immediately to take the stitches out, open up the wound again and tie up the artery, which he had forgotten or overlooked because of the constant application of the ice-bag.

  By the time the breast was open, the blood was already spurting from the artery; and as he took it up to tie it, the woman made a slight movement and was dead.

  "It might have happened to any one," he remarked.

  "You are a brute," I cried, "and should be charged with worse than murder." I left the room or I would have struck him. I spoke of it to the superiors, which all the students resented, but the superiors consoled me and themselves with the fact that she was a poor woman and really couldn't expect such treatment as was given to those who paid.

  The whole incident, coming on top of fifty lesser experiences, made me see that I would always be at odds with the whole of the profession and that I might as well give up my wish to be a surgeon, so I left Vienna and went on to Greece.

  Before I leave this question of health, I must say just one thing: the wisest of French proverbs is une fois n'est pas coutume — (once is not a habit), which, being interpreted, means that you can do a great many things once which, if you attempted to do frequently, would bring you to utter grief. I have known the time that a drinking bout did me real good, but if I had continued it every night for a week I should have been a pitiable object; and so there are many things one can eat once in a while which one can't eat every day. Une fois n'est pas coutume is a great rule of physical health.

  CHAPTER V

  Dark beauties

  This trek to the Zambesi was the most extraordinary adventure of my life.

  It altered my whole conception of life. Up to that year, about my fortieth, I had always tried to believe in a Divinity … that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.

  Now I began to put the comma after "rough" instead of after "ends."

  As soon as we got into Bechuanaland to the north-east of the Transvaal, Negro tribes, men and women, came constantly to visit us; they begged bright cloths from us and knives, and naturally my Boers, who knew them intimately, had provided me with all sorts of things with which to barter for furs, etc. I soon found that the younger of the brothers was fond of gratifying his lust with any young Negro girl who took his fancy, and I had to acknowledge that the girls were anything but reserved. Karl was a fine, big man, fully six feet in height and perhaps thirty years of age, and his brother was even bigger and burlier, perhaps ten years older, and altogether more brutal: we always spoke of him as the "Doctor."

  One morning, I remember, we were late in starting and some of the Negro leaders were laughing because Karl was not ready, having been occupied with a Negro girl in his tent. As soon as the "Doctor" learned this, he strode to the tent, and tearing up the fastenings, overthrew it and exposed his brother, half-dressed, who was packing his valise. The young Negro girl who had been helping him started up when the tent fell, and smiling, held out her hands to the "Doctor." Red with rage, he caught her by the left breast and flung her from him. She shrieked and began to cry: Karl expostulated with him; but I was furious.

  "I want you to know once for all," I cried, "that I won't have these colored people ill-treated."

  "Bestie!" he replied.

  "They may be beasts, in your opinion," I went on, "but I insist that they shall be treated decently. To kiss
a girl first and then maltreat her is shameful! And I won't stand for it!"

  Karl nodded agreement with me while the "Doctor" went off muttering and scowling.

  It was Karl who gave me at our next stopping place a lesson in Negro morality. A small tribe had come to our camp to beg: he and I got out some colored stuffs and showed them to the women and girls, who went crazy with delight. One of the prettiest of them and best formed, a girl of perhaps fifteen, took up a piece of bright blue. She was, of course, naked, except the little apron that half-covered her nudity. Karl at once threw the cloth about her shoulders: she laughed gleefully and strutted about with it; he went over and kissed her, saying she could have it. At once she threw her arms about him and then, saying something, lifted her apron.

  "What does she say?" I asked.

  "That she's ready for a man!" said Karl.

  "What does she mean?" I asked, and Karl set himself to explain to me a custom which I found was almost universal.

  "As soon as half a dozen girls in a tribe reach puberty," Karl said, "they are taken by a couple of old women to the nearest stream. There the old crones, with great ceremony, break the girls' maidenheads and then declare them fit and ready, in a week or so, to give pleasure to men and bear children."

  The whole affair seemed astonishing to me: I had always imagined that the maidenhead was a result, or at least an indication, of the proprietary instinct of the male, and if it were thus gradually developed by natural selection, why do away with it in such a coarse way? But Karl assured me that the girls were all delighted to be rid of it and free to devote themselves to the higher uses of maturity.

  After a month's trekking we were visited one evening by a tribe which possessed a young girl almost completely white. The heads of the tribe assured Karl that she was the product of a white missionary, who fifteen years ago had journeyed far, far to the north across the great river.