In such a mood it is imperative that one should seek distraction.  The shining example of Mr. Harry Hawk did not lure me.  Taking to drink would be a nuisance.  Work was what I wanted.  I would toil like a navvy all day among the fowls, separating them when they fought, gathering in the eggs when they laid, chasing them across country when they got away, and even, if necessity arose, painting their throats with turpentine when they were stricken with roop.  Then, after dinner, when the lamps were lit, and Mrs. Ukridge nursed Edwin and sewed, and Ukridge smoked cigars and incited the gramophone to murder “Mumbling Mose,” I would steal away to my bedroom and write—­and write—­and write.  And go on writing till my fingers were numb and my eyes refused to do their duty.  And, when time had passed, I might come to feel that it was all for the best.  A man must go through the fire before he can write his masterpiece.  We learn in suffering what we teach in song.  What we lose on the swings we make up on the roundabouts.  Jerry Garnet, the Man, might become a depressed, hopeless wreck, with the iron planted immovably in his soul; but Jeremy Garnet, the Author, should turn out such a novel of gloom, that strong critics would weep, and the public jostle for copies till Mudie’s doorway became a shambles.

Thus might I some day feel that all this anguish was really a blessing—­effectively disguised.

* * * * *

But I doubted it.

* * * * *

We were none of us very cheerful now at the farm.  Even Ukridge’s spirit was a little daunted by the bills which poured in by every post.  It was as if the tradesmen of the neighbourhood had formed a league, and were working in concert.  Or it may have been due to thought-waves.  Little accounts came not in single spies but in battalions.  The popular demand for the sight of the colour of his money grew daily.  Every morning at breakfast he would give us fresh bulletins of the state of mind of each of our creditors, and thrill us with the announcement that Whiteley’s were getting cross, and Harrod’s jumpy or that the bearings of Dawlish, the grocer, were becoming overheated.  We lived in a continual atmosphere of worry.  Chicken and nothing but chicken at meals, and chicken and nothing but chicken between meals had frayed our nerves.  An air of defeat hung over the place.  We were a beaten side, and we realised it.  We had been playing an uphill game for nearly two months, and the strain was beginning to tell.  Ukridge became uncannily silent.  Mrs. Ukridge, though she did not understand, I fancy, the details of the matter, was worried because Ukridge was.  Mrs. Beale had long since been turned into a soured cynic by the lack of chances vouchsafed her for the exercise of her art.  And as for me, I have never since spent so profoundly miserably a week.  I was not even permitted the anodyne of work.  There seemed to be nothing to do on the farm.  The chickens were quite happy, and only asked to be let alone and allowed to have their meals at regular intervals.  And every day one or more of their number would vanish into the kitchen, Mrs. Beale would serve up the corpse in some cunning disguise, and we would try to delude ourselves into the idea that it was something altogether different.