That night
I shut myself in my room, barred my windows, drew my curtains, and made a great
destruction. All books or pictures which
recalled to me the moorlands were ruthlessly doomed. Novels, poems, treatises I flung into an old
box, for sale to the second-hand bookseller.
Some prints and water-colour sketches I tore to pieces with my own
hands. I ransacked my fishing-book, and
condemned all tackle for moorland waters to the flames. I wrote a letter to my
solicitors, bidding them to go no further in the purchase of a place in Lorne I
had long been thinking of. Then, and not
till then, did I feel the bondage of the past a little loosed from my
shoulders. I made myself a night-cap of
rum-punch instead of my usual whisky-toddy, that all associations with that
dismal land might be forgotten, and to complete the renunciation I returned to
cigars and flung my pipe into a drawer.
But when I
woke in the morning I found that it is hard to get rid of memories. My feet were still sore and wounded, and when
I felt my arms cramped and reflected on the causes, there was that black memory
always near to vex me.
From No-Man's Land (John Buchan, 1898)
