A Last Diary | Page 3

little in common temperamentally,
there always existed a strong tie of affection between my father and
Barbellion, and I believe there is to be found among the latter's still
unexamined literary remains a sympathetic sketch of the personality of
John Cummings. In his infancy Barbellion nearly died from an attack
of pneumonia, and from that early illness, one is inclined to think, his
subsequent ill-health originated. He was a puny, undersized child,
nervously shy, with a tiny white face and large brown melancholy eyes.
He was so frail that he was rather unduly coddled, and was kept at
home beyond the age at which the rest of us had been sent to school. I
taught him in my father's officestudy to read and write, as well as the
rudiments of English history and English literature, and a little Latin.
Up to the age of nine, when he started to attend a large private school in
the town, he was slow of apprehension, but of an inquiring mind, and
he rarely forgot what he had once learnt. He was nearly twelve years
old before his faculties began to develop, and they developed rapidly.
He revealed an aptitude for mathematics, and a really surprising gift of
composition; some of his school essays, both in style and manner, and
in the precocity of their thought, might almost have been written by a
mature man of letters. The headmaster of the school, who had been a

Somersetshire County cricketer, and whose educational outlook was
dominated by his sense of the value of sports and games, was a little
disconcerted by this strange, shy boy and his queer and precise
knowledge of outof-the-way things, but he had the acumen to recognise
his abilities and to predict for him a brilliant future. He read all kinds of
books, from Kingsley to Carlyle, with an insatiable appetite. It was
about this time, too, that he began those long tramps into the
countryside, over the hills to watch the staghounds meet, and along the
broad river marshes, that provided the beginnings and the foundation of
the diary habit, which became in time the very breath of his inner life.
He loved the open air, and all that the open air meant. After hours of
absence, we knew not where, he would return glowing with happy
excitement at some adventure with a friendly fisherman, or at the
identification of a rare bird. Even now the wonder of the world was
gripping him in its bewitching spell. In later days he expressed its
power over him in words such as these, with many variations :
"Like a beautiful and terrible mistress, the world holds me its devoted
slave. She flouts me, but I love her still. She is cruel, but still I love her.
My love for her is a guilty love for the voluptuous curves of the
Devonshire moors, for the bland benignity of the sun smiling alike on
the just and on the unjust, for the sea which washes in a beautiful shell
or a corpse with the same meditative indifference. "
In these early years, I remember, the diary took the outward form of an
old exercise book, neatly labelled and numbered, and it reflected all his
observations on nature. The records, some of which were reproduced
from time to time in The Zoologist, were valuable not only in their
careful exactitude, but for their breadth of suggestion, and that
inquiring spirit into the why of things which proved him to be no mere
classifier or reporter. They were the outcome of long vigils of
concentrated watching. I have known him to stay for two or three hours
at a stretch in one tense position, silently noting the torpid movements
of half a dozen bats withdrawn from some disused mine and kept for
experiments in the little drawing-room that was more like a laboratory
than a place to sit in. He probably knew more about North Devon and
the wild creatures that inhabited its wide spaces than any living person.

Sometimes he was accompanied on his journeys, which occupied most
of his spare time and the greater part of the week-ends, by two or three
boisterously high-spirited acquaintances of his own age, who, though
leagues removed from him in character and outlook, seemed to find a
mysterious charm in his companionship, and whose solemn respect for
his natural history lore he cunningly made use of by employing them to
search for specimens under his guidance and direction.
When he was fourteen years of age his fixed determination to become a
naturalist by profession was accepted by all of us as a settled thing. My
father, whose income was at this time reduced through illness by about
half, generously encouraged him in his ambition by giving him more
pocket money