“Physic” by Water De La Mare #GBSS17/27

“Physic” by Water De La Mare Number 17 of 27 Great British Short Stories 

Premise: A mother and wife nurses a sick child, and a deadbeat husband. A doctor has words…

Review: This is brilliant.  The man could observe, write, cut.

Outa ten: 10

Keywords: love, procrastination, advice

Quotes: 

“It was a little way Emilia had. As tenaciously as she could she always put off until to-morrow even what it was merely difficult to put up with to-day. Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you, was her motto when driven into a corner. She hated problems, crises, the least shadow of any horror, though they would sometimes peer up at her out of her mind – and from elsewhere – when she wasn’t looking, like animals at evening in the darkening hills. But when they actually neared, and had to be faced; well, that was quite another matter.”

“He had decided to have his supper egg fried, though “lightly boiled” was the institution. And Emilia had laughed when, after long debate, he had declared that he had chosen it fried because then it was more digestible. She was dishing it up from the spoke and splutter – a setting sun on a field of snow, and with a most delicate edging of scorch.”

“In the instant that followed, before even she could insist on raising her eyes from this queer scrap of ‘evidence’, her mind suddenly discovered that it was dazed and in the utmost confusion. It was as if, like visitors to a gaudy Soho restaurant, a jostling crowd of thoughts and image, recollections, doubts, memories, clues, forebodings, apprehensions and reiterated stubborn reassurances had thronged noisy and jostling into consciousness – and then were gone again. And at that, at once, as if by instinct and as unforeseeably as a night moth alights on one out of a multitude of flowers, her stricken glance encountered her  husband’s note.”

“When shells explode why be concerned with fuse or packing?”

“Husbands may go, love turn, the future slip into ruin as silently and irretrievably as a house of cards. But children must not be kept waiting: not sick children.” p.222

Blind fool! Blind fool!  – foreseeing plainly every open or half-hidden hint and threat of to-night’s event, smelling it, tasting it, hearing it again and again knocking at the door of her mind, she had yet continually deferred the appalling moment when she must meet it face to face, challenge and be done with  it, and accept the consequences.” p.22

“What needs most daring must be done instantly.”p224

“Still, all vocabularies are minute for what they are sometimes needed to express – or to keep silent about.” p.225

“Consciousness was like the scene of a fair – a dream-fair, all distortion, glare, noise, diablerie and confusion.” p.225

“Each of them was investigating the map of a familiar country, but the cartographer must now have sketched it from an unprecedentedly eccentric angle.” p.227

“Husbands, of course, are not really of much importance in life – not really. Necessities perhaps; but here to-day and gone tomorrow.” p.230

Words: 

Covey – 1. a mature bird or pair of birds with a brood of young also : a small flock 2. company, group a covey of schoolchildren

Spinnery The meaning of SPINNERY is a spinning mill.

Diablerie the quality of being reckless or wild in a charismatic way.

Huckaback Huckaback is a type of coarse absorbent cotton or linen fabric used for making towels

Look up: Asquith and “Wait and See”

Asquith’s collegiate approach;^[566] his tendency to “wait and see”;^[567] his stance as the chairman of the cabinet,^[568] rather than leader of a government—”content to preside without directing”;^[569] his “contempt for the press, regard[ing] journalists as ignorant, spiteful and unpatriotic”;^[570] and his weakness for alcohol—”I had occasion to speak to the P.M. twice yesterday and on both occasions I was nearly gassed by the alcoholic fumes he discharged”;^[571] all contributed to a prevailing sense that Asquith was unable to rise to “the necessities of total warfare.”

Afterlives of the story/connections to other stuff: xx

Is it online? Apparently not – the first one that isn’t…`