but even I realise now that there must be no delay. I have delayed
because I have procrastinated all my life and because I am
ashamed--ashamed for the first time in all my shameless career.
But there is no need to tell you what I am--you told me candidly
enough yourself in the old days--it is sufficient to say that it
is the same John Locke as then--drunkard and gambler, spendthrift
and waster! And I don't think that my worst enemy would have much
to add to this record, but then my worst enemy has always been
myself. Looking back now over my life--queer what a stimulating
effect the certainty of death has to the desire to find even one
good action wherewith to appease one's conscience--it is a marvel
to me that Providence has allowed me to cumber the earth so long.
However, it's all over now--they give me a few days at the
outside--so I must write at once or never. Barry, I'm in trouble,
the bitterest trouble I have ever experienced--not for myself, God
knows I wouldn't ask even your help, but for another who is dearer
to me than all the world and for whose future I can do nothing.
You never knew that I married. I committed that indiscretion in
Rome with a little Spanish dancer who ought to have known better
than to be attracted by my _beaux yeux_--for I had nothing
else to offer her. We existed in misery for a couple of years and
then she left me, for a more gilded position. But I had the child,
which was all I cared about. Thank God, for her sake, that I was
legally married to poor little Lola, she has at least no stain on
her birth with which to reproach me. The officious individual who
is personally conducting me to the Valley of the Shadow warns me
that I must be brief--I kept the child with me as long as I could,
people were wonderfully kind, but it was no life for her. I've
come down in the social scale even since you knew me, Barry, and
at last I sent her away, though it broke my heart. Still even that