'I knew my father was worried,' he
admits. That cast the smallest of shadows upon his delighted departure
for Italy and Greece and Egypt with three congenial companions in one of
the new atomic models. They flew over the Channel Isles and Touraine,
he mentions, and circled about Mont Blanc--'These new helicopters, we
found,' he notes, 'had abolished all the danger and strain of sudden
drops to which the old-time aeroplanes were liable'--and then he went on
by way of Pisa, Paestum, Ghirgenti, and Athens, to visit the pyramids
by moonlight, flying thither from Cairo, and to follow the Nile up
to Khartum. Even by later standards, it must have been a very gleeful
holiday for a young man, and it made the tragedy of his next experiences
all the darker. A week after his return his father, who was a widower,
announced himself ruined, and committed suicide by means of an
unscheduled opiate.
At one blow Barnet found himself flung out of the possessing, spending,
enjoying class to which he belonged, penniless and with no calling by
which he could earn a living. He tried teaching and some journalism, but
in a little while he found himself on the underside of a world in which
he had always reckoned to live in the sunshine. For innumerable men such
an experience has meant mental and spiritual destruction, but Barnet, in
spite of his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed himself when put
to the test, of the more valiant modern quality.
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