4 The Diary of a Drug Fiend
I had gone into the air service; did pretty well,
though somehow I was never sure either of myself or
of my machine. My squadron commander used to tell
me that I should never make a great airman.
“Qld thing,” he said, “ you lack the instinct,”
qualifying the noun with an entirely meaningless
adjective which somehow succeeded in making his
sentence highly illuminating.
“Where you get away with it,” he said, “is that
you have an analytic brain.”
Well, I suppose I have. That’s how I come to be
writing this up. Anyhow, at the end of the war I
found myself with a knighthood which I still firmly
believe to have been due to a clerical error on the part
of some official.
As for Uncle Mortimer, he lived on in his crustacean
way; a sulky, rich, morose, old bachelor. We never
heard a word of him.
And then, about a year ago, he died; and I found
to my amazement that I was sole heir to his five or six
thousand a year, and the owner of Barley Grange;
which is really an awfully nice place in Kent, quite near
enough to be convenient for the prosperous young man
about town which I had become; and for the best
of it, a piece of artificial water quite large enough for
me to use for a waterdrome for my seaplane.
I may not have the instinct for flying, as Cartwright
said; but it’s the only sport I care about.
Golf? When one has flown over a golf course, those
people do look such appalling rotters | Such pigmy
solemnities!
Now about my feeling depressed. When the end of
the war came, when I found myself penniless, out of a
job, utterly spoilt by the war (even if I had had the
money) for going on with my hospital, I had developed
an entirely new psychology. You know how it feels
when you are fighting duels in the air, you seem to be
detached from everything. There is nothing in the