LIVING BACKWARDS 



purpose in order to understand that sudden death 

 was not altogether preferable to slow extinction 

 in utter solitude. 



The Doctor had used the lad as a sort of emo 

 tional lever, but I soon found out that the lad 

 himself was as rigid in his views of life as the 

 moral law. He never bent a single natural 

 impulse to accommodate me. I was to bend all 

 my case-hardened habits to accommodate him. He 

 expected me to go to bed at eight o clock and to 

 get up at five. He had in his bones some kind 

 of thermometrical arrangement with the sun. He 

 insisted that a breakfast at seven o clock was the 

 proper thing, and he carried this obduracy so far 

 that he serenely set up oatmeal and milk as a suf 

 ficient inducement. When I told him that we 

 were going to play Robinson Crusoe in the woods 

 for a year, he complacently accepted it with the 

 immediate arrangement that I was to be the man 

 Friday. 



The fact is I never suspected how consum 

 mately I had drifted into an artificial and selfish 

 disregard of the normal mean of things until I 

 began to associate on intimate terms with my 

 own offspring. After a week of it I appealed to 

 the Doctor by mail. &quot; What am I going to do 

 to occupy my mind ? &quot; 



&quot; Don t occupy it,&quot; he wrote back. &quot; What 

 did you climb out of the cerebral maelstrom for ? 

 Stop thinking for a while. Play. Become an 

 animal and watch Charlie.&quot; 



&quot; Is thy servant then a dog ? &quot; I inquired. 



21 



