The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy

Author:Bruce Duffy [Duffy, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Historical, Philosophy
ISBN: 9780395900574
Publisher: Replica Books
Published: 1987-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

In the end, it was out of sympathy for D.D. that Ottoline made the supreme effort it took to pry her loose from him — if only temporarily.

As for Russell, he was completely unrepentant — defiantly so — when Ottoline exposed his deceits. A year before, he would have begged her forgiveness, but now he just walked away, furious to be bothered with this nonsense when he was busy with weightier matters. Ottoline found his strength and distance appalling. Within a matter of weeks, the war had completely transformed him. And all the while, their relationship was undergoing a similar transformation, existing on less, then on hardly anything at all.

D.D. remained in London, where Russell heard from reliable sources that she had been jailed for prostitution and hospitalized after a suicide attempt. Violent, disheveled, bizarre, she would periodically turn up to plague him at rallies or meetings, once embarrassing him so deeply that he threatened legal action. D.D. was not an entirely isolated case: Russell encountered many confused young women like her at the height of the war. Starved for grand feelings and a cause, working long hours, as he did, at injury to their health, they followed him like enervated ghosts. And, just as lost as any of them, Russell had them — uncontrollably and indiscriminately, one after another.

Then, two years later, in the fall of 1916, Russell awoke in the middle of the night to what sounded like the squalling of a cat in heat. It was D.D., sobbing outside his door.

He was already a man besieged. German zeppelins were bombing London, and the police had him under surveillance for his activities against the war. Almost the moment he heard her, he jumped out of bed, breathing into his hand as he listened to the drunken scrabble of her nails on the door. For ten minutes she sobbed and pleaded before agreeing to leave him alone forever if he would just open the door and listen for five minutes. He set his watch on the table, unfastened the latch and gave her those five minutes. Had his flat been the last refuge on earth, he wouldn’t have given her a minute more.

Time’s up! he snapped, cutting her off. Thank God your time is up! And with that he shoved her out the door.

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